French mortgage comparison tables: Things to look out for.

Using a French mortgage comparison table is a good method for comparing the differences between mortgages in France. A few sites offer such tables but generally these French mortgage comparison tables do not go into much depth, encouraging a click to fill in an application form or prompting a call to the French mortgage broker to clarify the situation. This trend is quite sensible in fact as due to the complexities of the French mortgages on offer make it quite difficult to display all of the salient points, rendering the comparison simply of the latest rates for French mortgages relatively meaningless.

For many years French banks have used an introductory rate, generally fixed for 3 months to make an attractive headline number which many buyers in France have been drawn to when browsing French mortgage comparison tables believing that mortgages in France are similar to those in the UK. We believe that these introductory rates are a sham and should be ignored as the key rate when taking any mortgage in France which has a variable element, is the margin which the bank applies to the European Interbank Offered Rate (Euribor).

The majority of tracker mortgages in the UK track the Bank of England Base rate which moves in the main once per month. French mortgage trackers, on the other hand, track the European Interbank Offered Rate which fluctuates on a daily/hourly basis, meaning rates can fluctuate less obviously. The Euribor is the rate at which euro interbank term deposits within the euro zone are offered by one prime bank to another prime bank. Now on average these fluctuations are not huge and the disparity between the European central bank base rate and the 3 month Euribor is not more than 0.3% and currency the 3 month Euribor is in fact below the ECB base rate of 1% at time of writing.

So search for good French mortgage comparison tables and make sure you find out the margin and which Euribor index your tracker rate will be based on. Just follow this link to our French mortgage comparison table which gives you an idea of how we think the information should be presented so that you can compare the different French mortgage options properly.

Posted in: French mortgage rates