By Bernard Hickey
It's come to be known in banking circles as the 'bifurcation' of the mortgage market.
It describes the new way that banks are dealing with home buyers after the imposition by the Reserve Bank of its high Loan to Value Ratio (LVR) speed limit from October 1.
The market has been split into two.
On the one side is high LVR borrowers who want to borrow more than 80% of the value of the property. More often than not they are first home buyers, particularly in Auckland.
Banks have mostly stopped new lending to first home buyers because the banks know that if they don't, they could go over the bank's speed limit and risk breaching their banking license conditions.
Banks have increased their interest rates for over 80% borrowers and toughened their lending criteria to exclude those on lower and less stable incomes.
On the other side of the market, banks love home buyers who want borrow less than 80% of the value of the house. All the major banks have ramped up their marketing activity to this side of the market, offering special discounts on fixed mortgages and other freebies such as televisions and iPads.
One bank, BNZ, has even offered them a credit card with an interest rate set permanently at the same level as its standard floating mortgage rate, currently 5.99%.
BNZ's 'HomeAdvantage' MasterCard also has no fees and earns Flybuys points. Normally this card would charge 19.95%.
Banks are ramping up their lending to this sub-80% side of the market for two reasons.
It is unrestricted and banks make more profits by lending more so any way they can grow lending is good for their profits.
Secondly, increasing the sub-80% category of lending gives them a bit more room to do some more above 80% lending once they've cleared their backlogs of pre-October 1 pre-approvals.
The Reserve Bank's high LVR speed limit is structured as a limit of 10% of all new mortgage 'flow', which means the more sub-80% lending a bank can do, the more above 80% lending it can do.
Rental property investors are in a much stronger position to join the favoured sub-80% category. They are often 'watering down' the equity in a house or houses they already own to buy more rental properties.
So instead of 'withdrawing' the 10% equity from an existing home to leverage it up to buy another home with a 90% loan, now the rental property investor just pulls out 20% and borrows the remaining 80%.
A first home buyer doesn't have that luxury of simply drawing down on more equity from an existing home. Such a buyer simply has to wait and save up more, or ask for gifts or loans from parents and others.
This week the Reserve Bank released the first figures showing the impact of the high LVR policy on this now bifurcated market.
As expected by the Reserve Bank, high LVR lending almost halved between September and November and now sits just above the 10% speed limit it set for the first six months.
Banks moved remarkably fast to get there, indicating they have virtually stopped all new lending while they work through pre-approvals.
High LVR lending fell NZ$566 million to NZ$571 million. But sub-80% lending rose by NZ$739 million to NZ$3.899 billion over the same period. See full story here.
This meant sub-80% lending to rental property investors and those lucky first home buyers with big deposits has more than offset the drop in high LVR lending.
Economists say this will soften the impact on house price inflation.
Also this week, the Master Builders Federation reported a 27% drop in inquiries for new homes because of the LVR limit as first home buyers pulled out and those already owning homes had to cancel because their 'chains' had been broken by first home buyers pulling out.
New building consents actually fell 0.6% in October, despite all the talk of housing shortages and the Auckland Accord.
It's early days, but the high LVR policy is struggling to contain house price inflation or lending growth.
It may also restrict the increase in new house building needed to control house price inflation.
It has, however, cleared first home buyers from the market and made it easier and cheaper for rental property investors to borrow less than 80% of the value of a home without competition from first home buyers.
It also appears to have delivered a de-facto easing of monetary policy at a time economists say economic growth is accelerating towards 5%.
So what was the point of all that again?
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This is an expanded version of a column first published in the Herald on Sunday. It is here with permission.
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