Home Loans Likely to Get Cheaper from this Week
As banks shift to a new system borrower could be paying less on their mortgages
Borrowers could be paying less on their mortgages as banks shift to a new system of linking such loans this week to benchmarks prescribed by the central bank. That may result in lowering the cost of funding by as much as 30 basis points in some cases, experts said. A basis point is 0.01 percentage point.
State Bank of India, for instance, has pegged
the spread at 2.65 percentage points above the repo rate, which is at 5.40%,
resulting in an external benchmark rate of 8.05%. That will bring the effective
rate to 8.20% against an 8.30% floating interest rate under the previous
marginal cost of funds based lending rate (MCLR) regime for salaried home loan
borrowers on loans up to Rs 30 lakh. However, there could be additional charges
added on to this based on the profile of the customer.
SBI will
charge an additional 15 basis points from non-salaried borrowers. Those in the
higher Risk Grade (RG) 4-6 will be levied a further 10 basis points. The
Reserve Bank of India said the benchmark can be the repo rate, or three-month
or six-month treasury bills, or any other benchmark published by Financial
Benchmarks India, which administers such rates. The central bank announced on
September 4 that banks would have to link loans to retail customers and micro small
and medium enterprises (MSMEs) to external interest rate benchmarks in order to
make the transmission of monetary policy more effective to boost credit growth,
consumption and investment in order to revive the economy.
Banks are free to decide the spread over the
external benchmark. Subsequently, risk premiums may change in line with a
borrower’s credit assessment as agreed upon in the loan contract. The repo
rate, at which banks borrow from the RBI, is at the lowest since February 2010
at 5.4%. The three-month T-bill rate has seen a drop of 100 bps since February
and is currently at 5.28%. The six-month T-bill rate, which was at 6.4% in February,
is now at 5.48%. While the repo rate has been slashed 110 basis points
between February 2019 and August 2019, the drop in MCLR has only been 20 basis
points.
An ICRA report said that external
benchmarking on lending rates is likely to result in significant volatility in
equated monthly instalments (EMIs) for borrowers. It’s estimated that a 50
basis point rise in the repo rate could lead to a Rs 2,200 increase in monthly
payments on a Rs 75 lakh loan payable over 15 years. A 100 basis point climb
could pinch the pocket by as much as Rs 4,500 a month.
