Meanwhile, nearly 18% of home loans moved from variable to fixed interest rates, something Beaumont said was \u201crelatively significant\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis may reflect a recognition that interest rates were becoming less likely to fall further as economic conditions changed,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Overall, there were 70,811 new home loans issued between July and December, up 17.5% from 60,249 in the first half of the year.<\/p>\n
Around a quarter (24.4%) of those new loans went to first-home buyers, similar to the previous reporting period.<\/p>\n
Beaumont said first-home buyers were widely reported as being locked out of the housing market a few years ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s encouraging to see first-home buyers taking advantage of the current housing market and cheaper loans, compared to the post-Covid highs.\u201d<\/p>\n
The average home loan value for first-home buyers was $524,850, up 3.4%.<\/p>\n
The average value of all new home loans fell 3% to $392,519.<\/p>\n
Outside of home loans, Kiwis were also getting on top of their debt, with 68% of credit cards paid off in full without incurring any interest cost, up 0.9%.<\/p>\n
The average monthly spend per credit card account rose from $2073 to $2287.<\/p>\n
Beaumont said the data also show a continued shift to digital banking and the low use of ATMs.<\/p>\n
\u201cNearly 80% of all bank customers are registered for online banking, including mobile banking apps, up from around 72% last time.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur banks have over 10 million unique customers, and they made 2.4 billion transactions in the second half of 2025. Less than 2% of those transactions were made at ATMs.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Meanwhile, nearly 18% of home loans moved from variable to fixed interest rates, something Beaumont said was \u201crelatively…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":401649,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[3225,3017,916,138,23159,8278,3105,127,10668,807,130,16400,111,139,69,90,81743,644,1305,165],"class_list":["post-401648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-according","tag-ahead","tag-banking","tag-business","tag-challenging","tag-conditions","tag-data","tag-despite","tag-economic","tag-kiwis","tag-more","tag-mortgage","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-on","tag-repayments","tag-retail","tag-show","tag-their"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=401648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401648\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/401649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=401648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=401648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=401648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}