Mortgage rules too tight for many people says ex-politician

Too strict and unnecessary mortgage rules make it needlessly difficult for many Dutch to buy a home, according to Maxime Verhangen. The former Foreign Affairs Minister and current president of Construction Netherlands is calling for the rules to be relaxed, Trouw reports. "The greatest dangers to the affordability of your mortgage are still the revenue loss through divorce, unemployment and disease", Verhagen said to the newspaper. "The strictly applied Nibud standards do not help for that unfortunately. All they do is unnecessarily deny many people access to a mortgage." In the Netherlands about 200 thousand households do not qualify for a mortgage for that reason. Verhagen wants people with incomes up to 30 thousand euros to be able to borrow a bi more, especially if they buy an energy efficient home. And with dual earners the second income should be taken into account more, he believes. He also believes it a good idea to let highly educated people borrow more, as it is likely that their income will increase sharply in the first years of their working lives. According to Verhagen, relaxing the rules a little will not pose significantly bigger risks for lenders. Figures from Construction Netherlands show that the risk of default in the Netherlands is less than 5 percent. At the height of the crisis in 2011, the number of foreclosures was less than 0.1 percent of total mortgages.