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"The market is changing so fast!" Recently, Wang Qiang (pseudonym), a real estate agent who has been in the industry for more than ten years, lamented to a reporter from the China Times that in the past, money had to be bribed into account managers in order to get loans approved, but now account managers get orders and give rebates to clients. The loan approval process has been greatly accelerated, and some loans can even be approved on the same day.

Personal housing mortgage loans have always been regarded as the most valuable assets of banks. In the heyday of real estate, there was an endless stream of people applying for mortgages at the bank gates. In order to get the loan quickly, many homebuyers gave gifts, entertained guests, and used connections.

Nowadays, this unspoken rule has changed.

"Nowadays, banks will give rebates to people who apply for mortgages. If you buy through an intermediary, you may end up with these rebates if you don't ask for them." On social platforms, netizens from many places shared their experiences with "mortgage rebates."

A reporter from the China Times found that the "rebate" ratio varies from city to city and bank to bank, ranging from 0.4% to 1%, and some banks even give away gold bars.

In this regard, Pan Helin, a well-known economist, pointed out in an interview with a reporter from the China Times that the mortgage interest rate is the price of the mortgage, and the so-called "rebate" is essentially a drop in the price of the mortgage. The key reason for the drop is the current low demand for mortgages, "too many monks and too little porridge", and banks are competing for mortgage customers and competing on prices.

“Rebate” is secretly popular

The so-called "mortgage rebate" refers to the phenomenon that banks return commissions to intermediary institutions that provide mortgage services (such as real estate agencies, guarantee companies) according to a certain percentage of the total loan amount.

The reporter noticed that the banks that provide "mortgage rebates" are mostly joint-stock banks, city commercial banks and rural commercial banks, mainly targeting the commercial loan portion of second-hand houses.

"Don't miss it if you want it." In July this year, Ms. Wang from Shanghai bought her first house. She learned about the rebate on personal housing loans through "5G surfing" on a social platform, so she contacted a bank that could offer "rebates" after signing the house online, and received a pleasant surprise of more than 20,000 yuan.

However, she told the reporter that she had put a lot of effort into finding a bank that offered "rebates." "Online people said there were rebates, but offline people said there were none. Often you have to talk to them privately or "hunt" online."

Ms. Wang told the reporter that soon after she left a message on the "mortgage rebate" experience post, someone contacted her, some were real estate agents, some were bank employees. She admitted that the specific amount of rebate she could get would depend on the results of the conversation, "the more we can get, the better, after all, it's not easy to make money now."

Wang Qiang told reporters that in order to increase the number of orders, some banks in Shanghai currently give intermediaries a commission rebate of up to 1,000 yuan (1%) at most, and a loan of 1 million yuan can get 10,000 yuan back, but most of the time it is 1,800 yuan (0.8%) or less.

The reporter noticed that some banks have made the "rebate" more secretive, choosing to give the borrowers cash bars. "They gave me 5 grams of gold, but the bank said they did not allow direct cash payments," said a home buyer.

"Currently, the four major banks do not offer 'rebates.'" A real estate agent from Jiangsu told reporters that if homebuyers apply for bank loans through a well-known real estate agency platform, there will be no mortgage "rebates." As for the reason, he bluntly said that "the bank's 'rebates' are 'swallowed' by the platform."

In Pan Helin's view, for customers, the substantive meanings of lowering mortgage interest rates and "rebates" are the same. It's just that some bank headquarters have requirements for interest rate quotations, and in order to snatch customers at low prices, branches circumvent interest rate restrictions through "rebates."

It is worth mentioning that during the investigation, many real estate agents told reporters that real estate agencies generally provide "commission rebates" for new houses.

A real estate agent in Beijing who has been in the industry for many years told the China Times reporter that if buyers buy new homes through an agent, they can get a certain amount of cash back based on the negotiation between the two parties. "Because new homes do not require customers to pay agency fees, and the developer will give part of the commission to the agency."

Banks are in a state of involution, and mortgage loans are plummeting

"This shows that banks are currently facing homogeneous competition, fierce competition for mortgage customers, and internal competition in the industry." This is how Pan Helin explained when talking about why the chaos of "mortgage rebates" is on the rise.

In recent years, it has become an open secret in the industry that bank employees "pay to work" in order to meet performance evaluation indicators. Previously, news such as bank employees spending tens to hundreds of yuan to "online purchase" personal pension account opening indicators has been on the hot search list. On social media, bank employees often make self-deprecating remarks such as "all branches are marketing" and "working hard every day to support the company".

The reporter noticed that the other side of the increasing "competence" of grassroots employees is that the total amount of personal housing loans from banks continues to shrink.

According to the financial statistics report for the first half of 2024 released by the central bank, RMB loans increased by 13.27 trillion yuan in the first half of this year. By sector, household loans increased by 1.46 trillion yuan, of which short-term loans increased by 276.4 billion yuan and medium- and long-term loans increased by 1.18 trillion yuan.

Generally speaking, medium- and long-term loans for residents are mainly mortgage loans, which means that the growth of mortgage loans has slowed down significantly in the first half of this year. Data shows that medium- and long-term loans for residents in the first half of 2024 fell by 19.2% from 1.46 trillion yuan in 2023, and fell by 66% from the peak in 2021. In the same period of 2023, 2022, and 2021, the increase in this figure was 1.46 trillion yuan, 1.56 trillion yuan, and 3.43 trillion yuan, respectively.

In addition, as the main force in issuing mortgage loans, as of the end of 2023, the mortgage balance of the six major banks was about 25.81 trillion yuan, a decrease of 556.9 billion yuan from the end of the previous year. Previously, in 2022, the mortgage balance of the six major banks increased by a total of 404.9 billion yuan, and in 2021, it increased by a total of 248.43 billion yuan.

In three years, personal mortgage business has gone from being the main driving force for bank growth to being the main drag.

“Rebates” are not new

It is worth mentioning that as attention to "mortgage rebates" increases, some regions have stopped "mortgage rebates".

Recently, the reporter learned from the industry that the Jiangsu Banking Association issued a notice on "Initiative on Prohibiting Rebates on Personal Housing Mortgage Loans and Jointly Maintaining Fair Competition Order in the Banking Industry", proposing that all banking and financial institutions standardize cooperation agreements with intermediary institutions before the end of July 2024, and emphasizing that banks must not pay commissions or rights in any form to third-party institutions and their employees, or personal housing loan customers for commercial personal housing loans.

It should be noted that the "mortgage rebate" is actually an industry unwritten rule that has been dormant for many years. Its reappearance this time is a "revisit of the old dream", except that this time the bank will give the money originally "returned" to the intermediary directly to the home buyer.

In an era of loose credit and banks competing for customers, commercial banks, especially small and medium-sized banks, are relatively weak in the game with intermediaries. In 2009, the real estate market was hot, and the mortgage "rebate" rose sharply. At the peak, the rebate rate could even reach 3%. At that time, industry insiders pointed out that the "rebate" behavior disrupted the market order, encouraged speculative housing purchases, and played a role in promoting the formation of bubbles.

In 2010, the China Banking Association issued Document No. 138 [2009], requiring domestic commercial banks not to pay mortgage rebates to real estate agencies and mortgage agencies in any form. The China Banking Association pointed out that "rebates" have triggered vicious competition in the mortgage business and disrupted the market order. High "rebates" have also raised the operating costs of banks, harming the interests of banks and consumers. Under the temptation of "rebates", some mortgage agencies assisted customers in providing false materials to lending banks, increasing the risk of bank mortgages and affecting the healthy development of mortgage business.

At that time, after several interest rate cuts in 2008 and a 30% discount on mortgage rates, banks' profit margins for second-hand mortgages had become quite narrow, especially in the first year of lending, when there was basically no profit. Stopping the "rebate" was institutionally beneficial to the healthy development of the mortgage market.

However, people from mortgage agencies said that if all banks stopped giving "rebates" to agencies, they would inevitably charge more agency fees from buyers and sellers to make up for the losses caused by the banks stopping rebates.

With the interests of many parties competing, can the "rebate" be truly stopped? Will it reappear in a different guise? Judging from the development of the market after the ban in 2010, the "rebate" has not been completely cut off, but exists in disguised forms such as "guarantee fees", "business consulting fees" and "marketing fees".

Editor-in-charge: Meng Junlian Chief Editor: Zhang Zhiwei