Mortgage fever: Catalonia hits 15-year high for home loans

BarcelonaThe drop in the Euribor and the expected rise in house prices have strongly boosted mortgage issuance, which continues the momentum of recent months and is now at its highest level in the last fifteen years. In 2025, mortgage issuance in Catalonia recorded its best June and the best first half of the year since 2010.

Mortgages issued in the sixth month of the year reached 7,154 in Catalonia, the highest figure in the last three months, while across Spain the number is declining by 41,834 transactions, according to data published this Wednesday by the National Institute of Statistics (INE). However, in the first half of the year, 243,275 loans were signed to buy houses in Spain, 25% more than the same period last year and the highest figure since 2011.

This figure comes at a time when the price of apartments is at an all-time high.surpassed its all-time high, established since the second quarter of 2007, at the height of the bubble, while the cost of credit is going in the opposite direction, following the European Central Bank's (ECB) interest rate reduction policy, which has seen up to seven rate cuts until last July, when it decided to halt the price cuts in the United States, pending the decision. This has caused the one-year Euribor, the benchmark for variable-rate mortgages, to reach its lowest level last May. at its lowest level since August 2022.

"The mortgage market is following the sales market: there is a direct correlation," Òscar Gorgues, manager of the Barcelona Chamber of Urban Property, explains to ARA. The truth is that the relationship between sales and mortgages became unbalanced two years ago: while transactions were on the rise, mortgages were doing so at a slower pace, indicating the access to the market of solvent demand that could access property without needing a mortgage, either because it was foreign demand or because the locals had family support.

Now that mortgages and transactions are at their highest, some consider this situation a new bubble, as detailed in this study on the cities of Barcelona and Madrid. In any case, it would be a price bubble, not a financial one; that is, prices are disconnected from fundamental economic variables, such as wages or economic growth. The financial bubble is related to demand fueled by financing of dubious solvency. "The mortgage market is very solvent because we have very low default rates, and mortgage terms are very orthodox: they are carefully studied and limited to those who are solvent and can repay them," explains Gorgues, who believes a financial bubble like the one that occurred during the 2008 crisis is not being created. "No."