The Japan Housing Finance Agency (JHF) announced on February 18th, the results of its "Survey on Housing Loan Lending Trends" for the calendar year 2021. 

In August and September of 2021, a questionnaire was sent to 301 financial institutions that deal with housing loans, asking them their attitude towards the future of real estate lending. 

The number of responding institutions tallied to 272, and respondents were asked to indicate their status as of the end of June, 2021.

In terms of their stance on new housing loans, 69.9% of respondents classified themselves as  "aggressive in lending" (down 1.4 points from the previous survey), while 30.1% were "maintaining the status quo in lending" (up 1.4 points from the previous survey).

In terms of their attitude towards refinancing, 55.1% classified themselves as "aggressive in lending", down 7.4 points since the last survey.  43.8% said they were "maintaining the status quo in lending" (up 3.3 points since last survey)  and 1.1% were "negative in lending attitudes”, up 0.1 points since the last survey.

In terms of the interest type of mortgage loans that are expected to grow in the future, "variable" (69.3%) was selected the most.  This was followed by "10-year fixed-term" (47.0%) and "full-term fixed" (24.4%).

With regard to eco-friendly housing loans, 24.5% of the respondents answered that they were dealing with such loans, 3.3% were considering dealing with such loans, and 72.1% were not dealing with such loans.  

Institutions that offer preferential lending on eco-friendly properties are expected to rise as more time marches on to Japan’s 2050 goal of being a completely carbon neutral society. 

Further Reading

JHF Survey on Housing Loan Lending Trends (Japanese only; February, 2022) 

JHF Historical Data from 2007 onwards (Japanese only)