Mortgage lending drops but rate of decline slows

MORTGAGE lending dropped again during the third quarter of this year, but the quarterly rate of decline has slowed significantly since last year, prompting hope that the market may soon pick up.

The latest quarterly Mortgage Market Profile – jointly published by the Irish Banking Federation (IBF) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) – shows that 12,189 new mortgages were issued between the beginning of July and the end of September, with a combined worth of €2.14 billion.

In volume terms, this represented a 3.9% quarter-by-quarter decline and a 56.4% year-on-year decline, while value was down by 1.3% on the previous quarter and dropped by 62.2% on a year-on-year basis.