Today, a villa in Sweden costs an average of SEK 4.5 million.

And the latest figures from the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority (from 2020) show that Swedes have borrowed a total of SEK 3,973 billion for housing.

Banks' margins on mortgages are often high.

The gross margin is 1.45 percentage points.

The figure shows the banks' actual lending rates minus their financing costs.

Large price differences

At the same time, the price difference is large between different players.

The cheapest mortgages right now, calculated on actual average interest rates for mortgages with a three-month commitment period, have Hypoteket (1.12 per cent) followed by ICA Banken and Landshypotek Bank (1.17 per cent) and Stabelo (1.19 per cent).

The mortgage is one of the fast-growing players challenging the big banks in the mortgage market.

Today, they lend a total of around SEK 15 billion to around 12,000 households.

However, they only lend up to 75 percent of the value of the home.

- It is above all digitalisation that allows us to offer lower interest rates.

Most of our processes are completely digital.

For example, you take out a mortgage with a bank ID from us instead of writing on paper, which means that we can keep costs down, says Hypoteket's CEO Carl-Johan Nordquist.

Lower margins

In addition, the challengers in the mortgage market have lower margins.

- The major banks have for a long time had fairly large margins on mortgage rates, so there is an opportunity to compete with them.

Our margin is about a quarter of that, so there is a huge difference, says Carl-Johan Nordquist.

The five major banks that are active in Sweden have the highest prices (see table below).

Nordea's customers (1.72 per cent) have the highest average interest rates, followed by Danske Bank (1.49 per cent) and Swedbank (1.46 per cent).

Nordea's Sweden Manager Per Långsved writes in an email to SVT, among other things:



“Our assessment in dialogue with our customers is that we have a competitive offer on the market at all maturities and can offer attractive solutions that suit the individual customer.

We work with individual pricing for customers and with personal advice. ”

Source for all mortgage rates in the article above: The Comparison Comparison Service March 29, 2022.