New mortgage taking increased during month of February

The number of new mortgages totaled 4.6 billion shekels last month, which amounts to a 5.1% increase in comparison with the 2014 average.

The volume of mortgages has increased slightly in February. The Central Bank of Israel has released figures today showing that the number of mortgages taken in February totaled 4.6 billion shekels, which is a 1% increase compared to the month of January.

Around 5.5 billion shekels were taken in new mortgages during the month of December 2014. This is when Yair Lapid’s 0% VAT law plan was cancelled, which caused many buyers who had thus far been sitting on the fence waiting for the plan to be implemented, to take out mortgages in large numbers. The total volume of mortgages that were taken in February doesn’t come close to beating that figure, but it is still a 5.1% increase compared to the monthly average in 2014.

Around 53% of the mortgages taken out in February were at fixed interest, which amounts to 2.44 billion shekels. The other 47% of mortgages were taken at variable interest rates.

In October 2014 the trend was reversed, and the total number of fixed-rate interest mortgages exceeded the number of variable interest-rate mortgages. Since then the disparity between fixed interest and variable interest has continued to grow.