The commercialization of mortgages linked to IRPH has been maintained in recent years despite the legal doubts surrounding this mortgage index and the threat of having to face millionaire indemnities that hangs over the entities. Only between 2014 and the first half of 2019, 14,269 variable-rate loans linked to the IRPH swing have been sold in Spain, according to statistics published by the Registrar's Association and the National Statistics Institute. This is an average of 1% of the total in this five years, a figure much lower than the 24% that the commercialization reached in the first years of the century in the height of loans at variable interest rates.
Today everything is different. Financial institutions are making an effort to sell mortgages at a fixed rate due to the lowering of money in Europe and the prolonged collapse of benchmark indices such as the Euribor, which is already listed in negative. 40% of the loans granted last year were fixed -that is, without variation during the entire life of the credit-, which meant the greatest data in the historical series in «a situation that has been surpassing quarter after quarter», explain the Registrars in their latest annual report.
The historical maximum of the fixed rate has, on the other hand, led the variable rate to be at its historical minimum. Within this, the Euribor is the used index of reference "and only modality used in practice" by large commercial entities, although IRPH still has a small market share that between January and June of this year has been located at 0.37%. The figure is higher than 0.28% in 2018 and represents the first increase since 2004.
In some autonomies such as Castilla-La Mancha or Extremadura the rate of hiring of the IRPH triples the national average and is still maintained by 1%. "Today there are no major marketing campaigns for this index because of its uncertainty, but there are sales in particular for specific types of customers," explains Miquel Riera, mortgage expert at the financial comparator Help my Cash. Other financial sources explain that several mortgages linked to this index took place at Banco Popular, before being absorbed by Santander in 2017.
IRPH became an index of residual use after its reform included in Law 14/2013 of support for entrepreneurs and their internationalization. This milestone meant the disappearance of the IRPH Cajas and IRPH Banks indexes marketed in the previous decade, which were replaced as an official reference by the IRPH Entities.
At the end of 2013, the Euribor was already quoted at 0.5% after the sharp decline registered during the crisis years, while the new indicator was at 3.39%. Today, the first is already in negative territory - with the consequent mortgage reduction - while the second has not fallen of 1.8%.
The Court of Justice of the European Union has to decide in the coming months if its commercialization was carried out in an abusive manner and there was a lack of transparency. The general lawyer of the court, whose opinion is followed in most cases by the judge, said this week that the fact of being an official index does not exempt an alleged lack of transparency, so it should be the national courts who analyze the case by If there was fraud. In the specific file analyzed by the court, the lawyer considers that its commercialization was carried out correctly by Bankia.
However, some entities have tried in recent months to reduce the "legal risk" arising from possible compensation for this matter, agreeing with their clients to transfer their mortgages to other fixed-rate modalities or linked to the Euribor.
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