The Bank of Russia evaluated the data available on the volume of mortgage loans provided by the banks in different parts of the country in the first quarter of the year. According to these data, Russian banks have provided their customers with 61,940,034,000 RUR worth of mortgage loans by April 1, 2007.

SKB-Bank’s Mortgage Lending Director Anna Samuilova says this success has been brought about by a long-term history of processing mortgages and clear and smooth loan-issuing procedures. As regards Sverdlovsk Region, for instance, the first mortgage was offered by a local bank as far back as four years ago.

Just as before, Moscow and Saint Petersburg are not on the list of cities with the greatest number of mortgages provided. These are actually the provincial cities that do best in this respect: the banks based in Tyumen Region offered their customers 5.460 billion RUR worth of mortgages in the first quarter of the year, those located in Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Region provided 3.041 billion RUR worth of mortgage loans. The volume of mortgages issued by Novosibirsk Region-based banks reached 2.905 billion RUR, that of mortgages issued by the banks located in Saint Petersburg and Moscow came to 2.848 billion RUR and 2.836 billion RUR, respectively. The volumes of mortgage loans processed in Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk Regions (2.276 billion RUR and 2.577 billion RUR respectively) became the country’s 6th and 7th largest in January-March 2007. Chelyabinsk Region, however, was No.1 in terms of rating dynamics since it managed to climb three steps up in just three months. The volume of mortgage loans received by people living in Chelyabinsk Region in the first quarter of 2007 only falls short of the respective figures for Sverdlovsk Region dwellers by 9 million RUR

No mortgage loans whatsoever were issued by the Republic of Ingushetia or Koryak Autonomous Region in three months of 2007. The volume of mortgages offered by the banks based in the Chechen Republic comes to 1 million RUR (which gives one reasons to believe this could have been a single loan).

As for SKB-Bank, the bank has issued about 3,500 mortgage loans worth approximately 3 billion RUR by April 1, 2007. This is definitely the greatest figure recorded among all the Ural banks; besides, SKB-Bank hits Russia’s Top20 largest banks list in terms of mortgage lending volumes.