MADRID, 27 Mar. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The number of mortgages constituted on homes increased by 2.9% last January compared to the same month in 2022, to a total of 37,435 loans, the highest figure in a month of January since 2020, when more than 40,200 mortgages were signed, according to the data released this Monday by the National Institute of Statistics (INE).

With the year-on-year rise in January, the home mortgage firm returns to positive rates after registering a year-on-year decrease of 8.8% in December 2022 after 21 months of consecutive year-on-year increases.

The average amount of mortgages on homes rose 1.3% year-on-year in the first month of the year, to 142,654 euros, while the capital lent grew 4.3%, to 5,340.2 million euros.

In January, the average interest rate for all mortgage loans stood at 2.86%, with an average term of 24 years.

In the case of homes, the average interest was 2.65%, above the 1.85% of a year earlier, with an average term of 25 years.

32.6% of mortgages on homes were established last January at a variable rate, while 67.4% were signed at a fixed rate. The average interest rate at the beginning was 2.38% for variable-rate home mortgages and 2.79% in the case of fixed-rate mortgages.

The INE has reported that it has proceeded to review the statistical series of interest rates since January 2020 after launching a new procedure to validate the results of the initial average interest rate in the constituted mortgages.

In this sense, he explained that the changes made in the validation process of these records consist of a readjustment of the filters for accepting anomalous values, which improve the estimation of average interest rates. "In this way, the revised series more accurately reflects the level of interest rates and their evolution over time," says the agency.