Successive rate hikes over the past few months have meant your home loan eligibility is down 20%. Getting a home loan has become even tougher for consumers, reports CNBC-TV18.
Two years ago if you could get a loan of Rs 1 lakh for your home, now it is down to Rs 80,000. Rising interest rates have meant eligibility criteria going down by as much as 21% in the case of ICICI Bank alone, the biggest mortgage player in the market.
With each 1% hike, loan eligibility per lakh rupees goes down by about 7%. In the past two-and-a-half years, home loan rates have gone up by 3.5%.
Higher interest rates have compelled borrowers to go for longer tenures. Two years ago average home loan tenure stood at 13 years, which is now up at 16 years.
This time around, 15% of the 10 lakh ICICI Bank home loan customers will also see their EMIs go up. With consecutive rate hikes, the tenure of these borrowers is exceeding their retirement age.
Till now consumers were fighting rate hikes by simply increasing their tenures so that the EMIs could remain the same. But that too has now got stretched to the maximum. Little wonder then that banks expect growth in the home loan business to be not more than 25% this year, the lowest in five years.