Home loan prices rise for first time in 12 months

According to Banco de Portugal, home loans showed a positive annual rate of change in June for the first time since the same month last year: 0.3%, increasing by 99 thousand and 694 million euros.

“The volume of housing loans amounted to 99.7 billion euros, up 0.3 billion euros compared to May,” the Bank of Portugal (BdP) indicated in an analysis published this Thursday, adding that the volume of these loans increased, year-on-year, by 0.3%.

“This is the first positive change since June 2023,” the central bank explains of the annual rate of change (tva) indicator, which excludes the impact of changes that were not motivated by the transactions themselves.

Among the total volume of loans to individuals, the annual increase was 1,031 million euros to 129,288 million euros, an annual rate of change of 1.3%.

For consumer loans, the amount increased by 6.3% compared to June 2023, to EUR 21,709 million, which is equivalent to the amount recorded in the previous month.

As for the “stock” of loans to enterprises, at the end of June the total amounted to 72.762 million euros, which is 437 million euros more than in May, but 0.5% less than a year earlier in TVA terms.

By size, micro-enterprises maintained a positive annual rate of change at 5.3%. After a negative year and a half, the annual rate of change among large companies turned positive for the first time in June, reaching 0.7%.

Small (-3.6%) and medium (-6.0%) companies continued to show negative indicators.

The industry and electricity (-2.9%) and trade, transport and accommodation (-2.4%) sectors showed negative values ​​in June, compared with values ​​of -3.8% and -2.5% respectively in May.

Conversely, the construction and real estate sector posted a positive annual rate of change of 3%, up from 2.4% in May.