Govt says it is going to get easier to get a home loan

The government has started its changes to the Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act (CCCFA), by repealing some parts of it.

Commerce Minister Andrew Bayly and Housing Minister Chris Bishop said the government is revoking 11 pages of what it calls "overly prescriptive affordability regulations," introduced by the previous government.

“These regulations created unnecessary compliance costs and are an excessive barrier for lending. And worse, the regulations failed to protect the most vulnerable Kiwis – the very people they were intended to safeguard," the ministers said in a statement.

“When the affordability regulations were introduced into the CCCFA in December 2021 it threw a bucket of cold ice over banks and financial providers by prescribing minimum steps to assess the affordability of a loan. The overly arduous checks meant the time it took to process loans dramatically increased. Lenders told me that a small loan that used to take two hours to process suddenly took up to eight hours.