India's largest mortgage lender, HDFC, has reduced its lending rate on housing loans by 25 basis points to 9.65%.
The new rate, which is applicable to both existing and new customers, will be effective from Tuesday. Women borrowers are eligible for an additional 5bps cut in home loan rates, HDFC said.
Following the cut, the effective home loan rate for female customers now stands at 9.60%.
HDFC's rate cut move comes in the wake of last week's 50bps reduction in repo rate by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Soon after the central bank's rate cut decision, many banks like the State Bank of India (SBI), Bank of India and Andhra Bank announced a reduction in their base rate.
While the country's largest lender, SBI, slashed its lending rate by 40bps, Andhra Bank reduced its base rate by 25bps. Private sectors banks like Axis Bank and ICICI Bank have reduced their benchmark lending rate by 35bps each.
With the latest cut, the RBI has slashed the repo rate by 125bps to 6.75% so far this year. The central bank, however, kept the cash reserve ratio (CRR) unchanged at 4%.
However, transmission of RBI rate cuts by banks to end users did not keep pace, as lenders remained sceptical about credit uptake even after large base rate cuts.
Prior to RBI's September meeting, the banks had cut the base rate by just 30 bps on an average compared to 75bps cut in the central bank's repo rate, Business Standard reported.
Bank credit growth, a major indicator of economic growth, slowed to a two-decade low in the fiscal year ending March 2015. In 2014-15, credit growth was up 9.52%, down from an increase of 13.83% in 2013-14.
