Westpac has cut its six month, 2 year and 3 year mortgage rates by 10-20 basis points, but has left its floating mortgage rate unchanged.
Westpac cut its six month rate to 5.75% from 5.85%, which brings it into line with the previous lowest bank rate of 5.75% from Kiwibank.
Westpac cut its 2 year rate to 6.30% from 6.40%, which brings it into line with the 6.30% lowest bank rate offered by ASB.
Westpac cut its 3 year rate to 6.70% from 6.90%, which brings it into line with the 6.70% lowest bank rate offered by ASB.
Westpac left its lowest 'Choices Everyday' floating mortgage rate of 5.60% unchanged.
Earlier on Monday, Kiwibank announced a special 'book-a-rate' 5 year mortgage offer of 6.95%, which was 65 basis points below its regular rate.
Westpac's 5 year rate is currently 7.6% and is unchanged.
See Gareth Vaughan's article here on Kiwibank's 5 year offer.
See all bank and non-bank mortgage rates here.
See our interactive chart showing average bank mortgage rates back to 2002.
Mortgage rates
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9 Comments
Cuts, cuts cuts....
Keep those cuts rolling out. Might be nearly time to fix for 2 years - mainly to silence those repetitive annoying economists with their claims of sky-rocketing interest rates 'just around the corner'.
Then again, why fix when the OCR might be 1.5 soon?
Then again BH might scare the RB with stories of booming house rices and 'outrageous' lending. Lending! Lending! - we should never borrow but rather save 400,000 and buy our houses with Cash....
Yes, well maybe our mindset is to now borrow too readily. The Kiwisaver home ownership option is probably helping younger people with saving deposits now. I remember Muldoon setup a Home Ownership designated account at banks back in the 80s - which helped saving for a deposit - and you got your tax back up to 1500 or 33% of your annual savings. This was how we bought a section & built a shell - through savings that could not be touched for any other purpose. The other mindset that has changed is to keep drawing down equity - in a previous generation once your house was paid off, you left it alone debt-free.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/money/5637242/Mortgages-to-fix-or-float
I guess we're getting sick of this so-called 'dilemma' question. Is Westpac trying to tempt us back into a fixed rate? What was their motive? Thought offshore funding was getting more expensive due to global markets/banking issues not cheaper?
If you fixed 6 weeks ago - are you regretting it now?
Good discussion on bank margins on mortgages here:
http://www.squirrel.co.nz/fix-float-dissecting-mortgage-rates/
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