Covid-19 continues to weigh down the house. Although the first green shoots started to appear in March, the quarter as a whole still did not reach pre-pandemic levels. In the first quarter of the year, 96,051 mortgage loans, 7.8% less than in the same period of the previous year, according to data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE).
During the third month of the year there was an increase in the number of mortgages of 35%, the highest since the outbreak of the pandemic, although this is the first month in which it is compared with a period already affected by Covid-19.
March has also been the month with the most mortgages constituted since the beginning of the pandemic, with 36,886 mortgages, but this boom has not been able to boost the data for the quarter. In January, the number of mortgages constituted was 27,518, 32% less than the first month of 2020, while in February the fall moderated to 14%, from 36,702 mortgages constituted to 31,647 firms.
In the first quarter of the year, it was not possible to reduce the fall in the number of signed mortgages, which in the last three months of 2020 was also 7.8%. With this already there are four quarters that do not reach prepandemic figures and they chain falls in the number of mortgages constituted.
The greatest decrease was registered in the third quarter of last year, when the mortgages signed were 5.5% less than those constituted in the same period of the previous year. Even with the permanent falls, activity remains higher than that registered in the first months of the pandemic: in the second quarter of 2020, 20% fewer mortgages were signed than in the same period of 2019.
In the accumulated of the year, from April 2020, the first month fully affected by the pandemic, until March 2021, they have been constituted 328,026 mortgages, which represents a decrease of 10.5% compared to the previous twelve months.
A faster recovery is registering the sale of homes. According to data from the Property Transmission Statistics produced by the INE, in the first quarter of the year the transaction of 239,957 homes was recorded, 0.5% below those registered in the same period of the previous year.
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