Current articles & practice reports
Market insights, practice reports and background on mortgage financing for non-resident taxpayers, expats and investors. All texts by Olga Nikushkina. As a mortgage broker in Germany working across 650+ banks, the comparison shown here isn't limited to one lender's view.
Current articles
Less mortgage in Spain — the real reason
Not the rate, not the 35% rule: loan-to-value, purchase costs and the age limit decide how much you can borrow in Spain.
Mortgage rates July 2026: the ECB hikes, the capital market falls
The ECB raised rates — yet capital-market yields fell. What that means for your financing.
Project financing 2026: when the bank no longer carries it
Why banks finance developers more cautiously in 2026 — and which routes via specialist lenders remain.
Declined financings: how Olga finds what banks overlook
Self-employed, non-residents, foreign-currency income — three real cases and how they were solved.
CRR III 2026: what non-residents need to know about bank checks
Why the panel of lenders for Germans abroad narrowed — and who still finances.
Renovation funding 2026: Gewerbe zu Wohnen & Jung kauft Alt
Two time-limited changes: commercial-to-residential from 1 July and better Jung-kauft-Alt terms from 3 August.
What gets written about here — and what does not
Plenty of sites report where German mortgage rates moved this week. We are not one of them, deliberately. Rate forecasts are a bet; they help nobody make a decision that has to hold for twenty years.
What actually costs people money is a different category of news: rule changes. A subsidy programme cut on a cut-off date. A supervisory requirement that quietly closes a set of lenders to a particular group of applicants. A deadline missed because nobody mentioned that the application has to be filed before the purchase contract is signed.
These changes routinely outweigh a half-point move in rates — and they tend to hit a small group hard rather than everyone a little. That small group is who this practice serves: people who are tax-resident outside Germany, paid in a foreign currency, self-employed, commuting across a border, or arriving on a residence permit that expires long before the loan does.
Three rules for these posts
- No rates, no yields. German price-indication law (§ 17 PAngV, Art. 247 EGBGB) sets strict requirements for quoting credit terms. A rate without the full statutory disclosure is misleading — and a rate that is three weeks old is worthless anyway.
- Source and date checked. Wherever a deadline, an amount or a programme condition appears, we say where it comes from and when we last verified it. Subsidy conditions change, sometimes with days of notice.
- No invented cases. Worked examples are labelled as models. Real cases live in the case notes — anonymised, but not made up.
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