Article 125

Description
Exposures fully and completely secured by mortgages on residential property
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1. Unless otherwise decided by the competent authorities in accordance with Article 124(2), exposures fully and completely secured by mortgages on residential property shall be treated as follows:

(a) exposures or any part of an exposure fully and completely secured by mortgages on residential property which is or shall be occupied or let by the owner, or the beneficial owner in the case of personal investment companies, shall be assigned a risk weight of 35 %;

(b) exposures to a tenant under a property leasing transaction concerning residential property under which the institution is the lessor and the tenant has an option to purchase, shall be assigned a risk weight of 35 % provided that the exposure of the institution is fully and completely secured by its ownership of the property.

2. Institutions shall consider an exposure or any part of an exposure as fully and completely secured for the purposes of paragraph 1 only if the following conditions are met:

(a) the value of the property shall not materially depend upon the credit quality of the borrower. Institutions may exclude situations where purely macro-economic factors affect both the value of the property and the performance of the borrower from their determination of the materiality of such dependence;

(b) the risk of the borrower shall not materially depend upon the performance of the underlying property or project, but on the underlying capacity of the borrower to repay the debt from other sources, and as a consequence, the repayment of the facility shall not materially depend on any cash flow generated by the underlying property serving as collateral. For those other sources, institutions shall determine maximum loan-to-income ratios as part of their lending policy and obtain suitable evidence of the relevant income when granting the loan;

(c) the requirements set out in Article 208 and the valuation rules set out in Article 229(1) are met;

(d) unless otherwise determined under Article 124(2), the part of the loan to which the 35 % risk weight is assigned does not exceed 80 % of the market value of the property in question or 80 % of the mortgage lending value of the property in question in those Member States that have laid down rigorous criteria for the assessment of the mortgage lending value in statutory or regulatory provisions.

3. Institutions may derogate from point (b) of paragraph 2 for exposures fully and completely secured by mortgages on residential property which is situated within the territory of a Member State, where the competent authority of that Member State has published evidence showing that a well-developed and long-established residential property market is present in that territory with loss rates which do not exceed the following limits:

(a) losses stemming from lending collateralised by residential property up to 80 % of the market value or 80 % of the mortgage lending value, unless otherwise decided under Article 124(2), do not exceed 0,3 % of the outstanding loans collateralised by residential property in any given year;

(b) overall losses stemming from lending collateralised by residential property do not exceed 0,5 % of the outstanding loans collateralised by residential property in any given year.

4. Where either of the limits referred to in paragraph 3 is not satisfied in a given year, the eligibility to use paragraph 3 shall cease and the condition contained in point (b) of paragraph 2 shall apply until the conditions in paragraph 3 are satisfied in a subsequent year.