Mortgage approvals rose again in April, according to new data from Banking and Payments Federation Ireland.<\/p>\n
A total of 4,729 mortgages were approved in the month – up 5.5% compared to March and 0.5% higher than in April 2025.<\/p>\n
Just over 60% – or 2,899 – of those were to first time buyers, which was 3.4% higher in the month but down 0.3% year-on-year.<\/p>\n
Despite that yearly decline in the number of mortgages for first-time-buyers, speaking on RT\u00c9’s Morning Ireland BPFI’s CEO Brian Hayes expressed confidence that there’s a positive uptick in delivery of new homes.<\/p>\n
“It’s a very strong first-time buyer market and there’s significant momentum within that market.”<\/p>\n
The number of movers getting approval rose by 5.3% in the month to 818, though this figure was 3.2% lower compared to the same month of last year.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile the numbers re-mortgaging or switching jumped 23.4% in the month, and 6% in the year, to 616. This reflected the rush by some to lock down a lower fixed rate before the European Central Bank begins to raise rates once again.<\/p>\n
“In a scenario where there’s market expectation of horizon interest rates by the ECB, obviously, people are looking for the best rates”, BPFI’s chief executive said.<\/p>\n
Mr Hayes added, however, that there is no expectation that mortgage rates would go as high as in 2022 during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.<\/p>\n
“We’ll have to wait and see what they do, but we’re not in a scenario that was there four or five years ago… when we saw interest rates rise from zero to 4.5% over 18 months.”<\/p>\n
In value terms the mortgages approved in April were worth a combined \u20ac1.55 billion – up 6.9% compared to March and 3% higher year-on-year.<\/p>\n
It means the average mortgage approved in the month was worth around \u20ac327,130, compared to \u20ac319,235 in April 2025. That is a 2.5% increase year-on-year.<\/p>\n
The increases in value and volume were roughly in-line among most categories. The bulk of the mortgage value went to first time buyers, who accounted for \u20ac966m of the total approval figure.<\/p>\n
It meant the approval secured by the average first time buyer was \u20ac333,218, compared to \u20ac330,354 in April 2025.<\/p>\n
However the average amount approved for those remortgaging or switching saw a more notable increase.<\/p>\n
The average approval in this category was worth \u20ac305,195 in April 2026, compared to \u20ac277,108 a year before.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mortgage approvals rose again in April, according to new data from Banking and Payments Federation Ireland. A total…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":472971,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[72,113,61,60],"class_list":["post-472970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=472970"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472970\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/472971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=472970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=472970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=472970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}