Mortgage approvals

This chart is based on an "experimental series" of data collected by the Reserve Bank. It is published weekly.

It is attempting to track the volume and value of 'new' mortgages written by all financial institutions.

However, 'new' is defined by each institution - so when a homeowner switches banks, it will be 'new' to the bank that has won the business, but it is not new to the mortgage market as a whole.

However, this series does give an interesting insight never-the-less into mortgage market activity, and is the only data we have tracking the volume of mortgage activity.

We are deriving an "average mortgage value" by dividing the weekly value recorded by the number of loans that represents.

The growth data is not week-on-week, rather it is the last 13 weeks compared with the same 13 week period one year ago. This eliminates the distortions a one-week comparative would obviously generate. This growth series can be seen here >>