Reporter Catherine Masters interviews Stephen as part of her article on mortgage interest rates.
Mortgage rates may edge up further in the months ahead but economists and mortgage brokers spoken to by OneRoof don’t expect big hikes from now on.
The Reserve Bank signalled in May it would not be lifting the Official Cash Rate further, leading to a premature expectation by homeowners that that was also the end of mortgage rate rises.
Since the May hiatus major banks have continued to put mortgage rates up, some more than once.
The OCR, however, is not the only factor in banks’ decisions to raise home loan rates. Global pressures are also at play, and when banks have to pay more for finance they charge more to lend it.
Mortgage adviser Stephen Robertson, from My Money, says he would like to say mortgage rate rises are done and dusted but he does not think that is the case just yet.
“I've got lots of clients who are really not happy with the way that the banks just keep rising rates and rising rates and rising rates.
“I'm like, ‘well, yeah, but there's also bigger things happening’.”
Banks are not the bad guys in the sense they are a business and need to protect their margins, he says.
Robertson expects rates will begin to come back slowly around this time next year but says people wanting to buy a house should do their homework and if they can afford to buy should go ahead, saying for most people the purchase of a house is the foundation of their financial wealth.
“It’s a starting point for building equity and some sort of stability towards retirement.”
See the full article here https://www.oneroof.co.nz/news/44053?utm_source=nzherald&utm_medium=nzhapp
