Housing Loans And Financing

[AmericanGuy1066]

This could be an interesting development. Standard Chartered wants to significantly increase its level of mortgage loans. Standard Chartered is sort of a "hybrid" bank in Thailand: local bank status, but part of a global network. This allows it to have around 40 branches (I think) compared to Deutsche, HSBC, Citbank etc which have only one.

I guess they'll still be restricted by rules which don't allow foreigners to own land so they can't lend against it. But for foreigners with Thai wives, wanting to act as guarantors for loans on condos etc, it could be interesting. It could also bring some much needed widening of services and better practices, which get a bit dominated by the big4 Thai banks sometimes. So could benefit Thais married to Thais, Thais married to foreigners and foreigners.

Source Bangkok Post 4 Oct:

Standard Chartered to boost home loans

DARANA CHUDASRI

Standard Chartered Bank (Thailand) plans to expand its housing loan portfolio over the next three years to 60% of total retail loans from only 10% now.

The bank on Tuesday announced a new marketing campaign offering mortgages fixed at 4.79% for the first three years, a waiver of the 1% fee for mortgage refinancing over 2.5 million baht and a guarantee of loan approval for qualified customers.

Interest rates from the fourth year will be quoted at housing loan rate (HLR) minus 2.25%, or equivalent to 6.5% based on current rates.

Applicants must have a clean credit history for at least the past 12 months, monthly income of more than 30,000 baht and total debt payments of less than 65% of monthly income.

Yuttachai Teyarachakul, an executive vice-president for consumer banking at Standard Chartered Bank (Thailand), said the bank hoped to lend two billion baht over the next two months under the promotion. ''The mortgage market this year has been quite quiet.

At the end of June, outstanding mortgage loans stood at 1.4 trillion baht, or just a minor increase from the 1.35 trillion outstanding at the end of last year,'' he said. ''We have just started getting aggressive in this space. We'll be using a low-pricing strategy to help boost our market share over the next several years.''

Mr Yuttachai said SCBT also planned to join together with local developers to offer pre-financing for new projects. The bank recently signed contracts with two property brokers: World Alliance and Live-Smart.

SCBT reported outstanding credit advances of 68.8 billion baht and total assets of 236.91 billion at the end of August. As of the end of June, SCBT had consumer loans of 55 billion baht.

Edited October 4, 2007 by AmericanGuy1066

[torrenova]

Just checked their website in Thailand which is a load of rubbish and does not mention anything connected with home loans.

[fletchsmile]

Just checked their website in Thailand which is a load of rubbish and does not mention anything connected with home loans.

Torrenova

My wife and I are in the process of obtaining a mortgage thru Stan Chart for this same package. So I can confirm the mortgage part itself of 4.79% for 3 years is correct.

I haven't seen it advertised on their website, but wouldn't read too much into that. Bear in mind E-business is less developed in Thailand. Plus for areas such as banking, Thais still often prefer the branch approach, and for mortgages as we know there are a lot of complex rules, so info on websites is minimal. Most websites show at best a one pager and say contact your branch. I guess Stan Chart haven't bothered with the one pager.

The standard of websites in Thailand generally is sometimes quite weak. I used to work for a company that did web design here as one of it's businesses. They did very well because of this gap/weakness in the market.

BTW You asked me on another thread who my mortgage was with. My response was here - not sure whether you read it:

http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=143781

If you're interested in a mortgage best way is to check around at the main branches of various banks, rather than online, to get a feel for rates and service.

Edited October 5, 2007 by fletchthai68