The Minister of Finance has announced he expects the Reserve Bank to have regard to house price sustainability when making its financial stability policy decisions.
Expect Interest Only Lending to come under further scrutiny.
And regulated debt-to-income ratios to come closer to reality.
WARNING!
Notifications coming through from some of our small business customers reporting increasing incidences of theft.
Tools / trailers / car wheels…. anything easily shiftable.
The Reserve Bank today announced an extension of the regulatory guidance for the mortgage deferrals program to help customers in need.
The regulatory guidance means banks can continue to offer temporary mortgage deferrals to their customers. (Previously erroneously called “Holidays”)
In a nutshell if impacted by the Rona you may be able to extend your mortgage repayment hold out to 31 March 2021 .
Your Lender will be asking a swathe of questions as to whether or not this is a good idea and your reasoning behind such a request.
As always please get in touch if you require assistance.
The main banks are out with temporary mortgage relief packages in line with the 6 month “holiday” announced by the Government last week. This program is a JV between the RBNZ, retail Banks and the Government.
Options include taking interest only for 12 months ie: paying only the interest cost with no payments to reduce the amount of the loan.
Or a loan repayment deferral which involves no repayments at all for 6 months.
Make no mistake, this is no “Mortgage Holiday”.
Your loan amount will increase while your repayments are paused.
And the Lender will still charge interest on what you owe on your loan. This interest is added to your loan amount and they charge interest on that amount as normal.
GLTA 🙂
Facilities are being put in place to temporarily assist customers facing cash flow issues.
Options include..
Access:
Waiver of home loan application, top-up, and re-documentation fees (Early Repayment Adjustment fees still apply).
Relief:
This 2 bedroom brick and tile unit in St Mary’s Bay sold today @ $1,020,000.
An end unit In a block of 4 its approximately 59 sqm internally.
Barfoot and Thompsons December sales figures are out confirming anecdotal evidence of a slow down. December 2015 sales were 796 down from December 2014 sales of 1050. A 24% fall. Some of the froth is coming out of the Auckland market.
Data out from Harcourts today shows a fall in Northern region sales of 14% when comparing November 2014 with November 2015.
Total new listing were down 17% and new auction / tender listings were down 26%.
The government has introduced a capital gains tax on residential property holdings for buy and sells within 2 years. Exemptions mean owner occupied housing is unlikely to be affected but the eye opener is that all non resident tax payers will now have to register with IRD and open an NZ bank account. Non resident purchasing of property here just became distinctly less attractive i’d imagine.
The odds of a OCR reduction next month have shortened considerably as result of the 2 big recent property announcements.
ANZ Bank has cut fixed interest rates today. 1,2 and 3 years fixed now @ 5.59%.
The policy changes, proposed to take effect from 1 October, will:
The changes also come with an expectation that Banks are to hold more capital against loans in the category of residential property investors.
At street level this may mean fee’s and / or an interest rate margin being applied to property investor lending.
We shall wait and see. A summary of a consultation process will be released at the end of the month.