The broader offer of housing loans, obviously fuelled by increasing demand, will prompt an impressive growth pace for this market in the next few years. According to market surveys conducted by those companies directly interested in this business, the Romanian market of real estate and mortgage credit will reach some 10 billion dollars in a few years, almost five times more than the actual size of the Croatian market, for instance.
According to the 2002 activity report of the Romanian American Enterprise Fund (RAEF), the Romanian market of housing loans currently revolves around 200 million dollars, but has a very high potential for growth, almost five times higher than the current level in Croatia - 2 billion dollars. Dan Ioan Popp, general manager of Impact S.A. says the market's appetite for credits ranges between 8 and 9 billion dollars annually. "Of course, this demand is theoretical - people cannot qualify to actually get this money," Popp says. "According to our estimates, the mortgage credit market will increase slightly, from 600 million dollars at the end of this year, to 2 billion next year and then some 4.5 billion dollars in 2005," he adds.
Starting from the $10 billion value and making a simple calculation (as the average value of a housing credit amounts to 20,000 dollars), we can safely conclude that banks will have more than 500,000 potential customers from this market segment alone.
"We do believe that the market will grow and that is precisely why we have decided to launch housing loans. According to our surveys, the obvious trend points to loans mainly for apartments and less for houses, while those bold enough to embark on a credit already have an average income per family exceeding 400 dollars," Rasvan Radu, vice-president of Raiffeisen Bank told Ziarul Financiar. According to Radu, this is the first year for such credits and the share of housing loans granted to natural persons will account for 10% of the total credit portfolio, but things will hopefully change next year, when this share may reach 50%.
"The inflation drop has paved the way for long-term mortgage loans in ROL. We believe the time has come for the 25-year ROL mortgage loan," said Jan Op de Beeck, president of the ING Group in Romania. ING has announced one of the lowest rates on the market, which has determined other banks to lower rates below 9% for the euro-denominated loans.
oana.nuta@zf.ro ; lucian@zf.ro
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