Published 19 April 2024 at 13.33
Economics. Households expect the Riksbank to lower the policy rate. As many as 94 percent of SBAB's new mortgage customers chose variable interest rates in March.
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Only 3 percent chose to bind their loans and the remainder chose to split the loan and combine fixed and variable interest rates.
Households are not attracted to fixed interest rates, even though the fixed interest rate is now lower than the variable one. According to SBAB, this indicates that it is expected that the variable interest rate will drop significantly, but there may also be psychological reasons.
– That 9 out of 10 have chosen a variable interest rate since the end of 2022 may be a consequence of that many have since felt that it was “too late” to fix the interest rate. Those who did not bond before or at the beginning of the interest rate rise have had to pay a high price. They may feel that they have been part of the great upswing and therefore do not want to also miss a potential downturn by fixing the interest rate. A feeling that sometimes may have trumped the fact that, after all, it could have been economically rational for more people to fix the interest rate, says SBAB's private and housing economist Linda Hasselvik in a press release.
The percentage who chose a variable interest rate has been relatively stable between 89 and 96 percent ever since December 2022. From a historical perspective, it is an “exceptionally high level”, according to SBAB.
SBAB has fully comparable statistics since January 2020 and the percentage who chose a variable interest rate has previously never been close to the levels they were at during this period.