Maharashtra tops in home loans, accounts for 24 pc of national sales

Mumbai: Maharashtra accounts for a fourth of the overall home loans sold by all types of lenders, with the financial capital, the adjoining city of Thane and Pune being the biggest pockets of demand, according to a report.

The western state having high urbanisation accounts for 24 per cent of the overall home loans as of September 2018, shows the data released by credit information company Crif High Mark.

Apart from Mumbai and Thane, the software and technology hub of Pune is fuelling the demand for home loans, it says.

These three cities were the top ones across the country, along with Bengaluru, as the leading markets for home loans in the country, the data show.

The overall home finance segment registered a 16.8 per cent growth over the year-ago period to take the overall outstanding to 17.9 trillion, the report says.

Dedicated housing finance companies (HFCs) lead the pack with a 41.9 per cent market share, while the state-run banks have a 38.72 per cent market share and their private sector peers hold the remaining 16.05 per cent, it says.

In what can be said as representative of the problems faced by the non-bank intermediaries towards the end of the September quarter, the share of the HFCs declined from the previous quarter's 42.23 per cent.

Private sector lenders have taken a bulk of the market share vacated by NBFCs in the home finance segment as they saw their share of the pie grow to 16.05 per cent from the preceding quarter's 15.54 per cent, the data reveal.

HFCs' lead margin is wider, if one were to go by the number of loans sold, the data show, pointing out that this segment accounted for over 51 per cent of the 12.3 lakh loans written by lenders in the first six months of the current fiscal.

A bulk 47.5 per cent of the overall portfolio is under Rs 25 lakh as of September, even though the Rs 50-75-lakh bracket loans jumped the fastest at 24.6 per cent, followed by 22.6 per cent growth in the Rs 25-50 lakh category.

From an asset quality perspective, repayments overdue for 91 to 180 days were maintained at 0.67 per cent, but the loans under Rs 25 lakh had a higher incidence of stress at 0.82 per cent.