HDFC home loans to become dearer
February 15: Housing finance
major HDFC on Thursday announced a hike in
its housing loan interest rates by 0.50 per
cent effective this month-end or early March.
HDFC Chairman Deepak Parekh said that the
bank's margins, which are currently at around
two per cent, are under pressure after the
latest CRR hike by the RBI and the bank will
have to raise the interest rate to maintain
that spread.
This would be the second
time within a month that HDFC would be raising
home loan rates. Earlier this month, it raised
the rates by 0.5 per cent after RBI had announced
a 0.25 per cent hike in overnight lending
rate, Repo, in its monetary review. ICICI
Bank had also raised home and car loans by
one per cent then.
Four PSU banks - PNB, Bank
of India, Bank of Baroda and Union Bank of
India - hiked their prime lending rates with
effect from Thursday, impacting a range of
products, including personal loans, corporate
advances, credit to small-scale industries
and agriculture loans above Rs 2 lakhs. However,
all of them spared home and car loans from
the rate hike.
These banks revised the PLR
since RBI announced that banks would have
to keep more money as cash with the central
bank. The move, technically called raising
of cash reserve ratio, was made to tame inflation
which touched more than a two-year high of
6.73 per cent in early February
Source:Ibn Live
