The work exploits a dataset made available by the main online mortgage broker (Mutuionline) that contains up-to-date information on mortgage supply conditions. This dataset allows us to assess trends in the mortgage rates offered by banks, distinguishing by customer and contract riskiness, and can be used to nowcast trends in banks' interest rates based on supervisory reports (MIR).
The main results are: 1) riskier mortgages, characterized by high loan-to-value ratios, lower borrower's income and long maturity, are offered by a small number of banks that charge higher interest rates; 2) keeping constant the level of risk, online banks offer, on average, better price conditions than traditional ones; 3) the rates offered by Mutuionline have a high predictive content for interest rates on fixed-rate mortgages at the individual bank level.
