Loan refusals have only increased for three months and no one is spared. “I had a 63-year-old client who wanted to buy a new principal residence. There were no issues on his file but, from the moment he got his insurance quote, the insurance was added to the credit and the file no longer passed”explains Thomas Bertrand, adviser at Artémis brokerage, in Paris.
With the skyrocketing rise in bank rates, it is becoming more and more difficult to obtain a mortgage. From low-income households to wealthy buyers, all face the same problem: their file exceeds the maximum interest rate that banks are authorized to charge, also called the usury rate. According to the French Association of Bancassurance Intermediaries (Afib), 45% of loans were refused because of the wear rate and more specifically 30-55 year olds. The risk is therefore to be refused a loan if the initial rate of the credit, to which all other costs are added, exceeds this maximum interest rate, currently at 2.60%.
If the rate of wear is fixed every three months by the Banque de France, the credit rates sometimes increase every week. Many buyers are thus caught in the middle, like Mylène-Sarah Illoul, 26, who wants to build a house in the Yvelines: “As soon as our broker started receiving rejections, he told us that he hadn’t expected this at all. He had seen rates going up very quickly, but he didn’t think there would be so many refusal because of the wear rate… We went so far as to say that we gave up, given the current conjecture.
“Today, almost no file escapes this problem.says Laurent Gomez, broker of the Vousfinancer agency in Houdan, in the Yvelines. Before, we were exposed exclusively to people whose cost of insurance was a little higher. Today, even young people aged 30-35 are exposed to refusals.
Mylène-Sarah Illoul will manage to obtain a loan, thanks to a contribution from her parents. For others, it is necessary to play the competition between insurances or quite simply to give up its project. “I’ve been doing real estate for five yearsassures Rémy Rafaitin, real estate agent at Futur Transactions, in Montigny-le-Bretonneux, in the Yvelines. Today, I have clients who have completely stopped their research because nothing fits their budget anymore. In four months, my clients can no longer put in so much and have put a stop to their real estate project.”
The attrition rate will not be revised until October 1, 2022, and during this time the real estate market should continue to slow.