As of the decision of the National Bank of Georgia (NBG), the term of mortgage loans in foreign currency is down from 15 to 10 years. The new regulation will enter into fore from January 1.
Lasha Kavtaradze, an economist at Galt& Taggart considers, that the National Bank has taken a hasty decision, which will bring artificial obstacles on the mortgage market.
"We still see that the NBG continues de-dollarization policy. If we look at the mortgage sector, we will see that the market is not overheated in this regard, prices are not too high and so on. As for the lending in total, we cannot say that it is deviated from the trend and needs some leverage. The growth rate of the loan portfolio in this respect lags behind the nominal growth rate.
The real estate market needs to be further developed, and artificial restrictions will bring some obstacles," Lasha Kavtaradze said.
