Central Plains Mortgage: Hong Kong's new mortgage insurance policy hit a 7-year low in November, and the amount hit a 6-year low

Zhitong Finance App learned that Wang Meifeng, managing director of Zhongyuan Mortgage Corporation, said that according to the latest data released by the Hong Kong Mortgage Corporation, the number of new mortgage insurance withdrawals in November 2025 fell 10.1% month-on-month to 560, and the amount also decreased by 9.9% to 2.8 billion yuan (HK$, same below).

The number of new mortgage insurance cases approved during the same period fell 8.6% month-on-month to 1,068. The number of cases fell to a low level of more than seven years (86 months) after December 2018, and the amount fell 6.7% to 5.6 billion yuan. It also fell to a low level more than 6 years ago (74 months). The previous record of hovering around 5 billion yuan was recorded from September to October 2019. The decline in numbers is mainly due to the complete relaxation of mortgage ratios, and demand for high-yield mortgage insurance from homebuyers has decreased; in addition, the proportion of investors entering the market has increased, and such buyers are not mortgage users, further causing the mortgage figures to remain low.

The overall property market traded well in the fourth quarter, but the proportion of mortgage insurance usage continued to be low. According to Wang Meifeng's analysis, based on the property policy that has been fully relaxed to 70% of mortgages, buyers no longer need to go through a mortgage to buy a home for the first installment, greatly reducing their dependence on high-yield mortgage insurance. According to the data, the guaranteed usage ratio has dropped from a high of over 30% before the relaxation to an average of about 15% this year. Furthermore, as the investment immigration threshold is relaxed and rental returns rise, the share of investors and long-term tenants entering the market has rebounded. Since investment properties are not suitable for high-yield mortgages, this has also kept the penetration rate of mortgage insurance in the overall mortgage market low.

According to the data, in the first 11 months of 2025, the number of new mortgage insurance withdrawals was 6594, down 25.2% from the same period in 2024; the amount of newly withdrawn mortgage insurance was 32.7 billion yuan, down 27.7% from the previous year. The number of newly approved mortgage insurance cases was 14,726, a decrease of 23.9% compared with the same period last year; the amount involved was 74 billion yuan, a decrease of 26.8% over the previous year.