What is a loan agreement?

A loan agreement is a 'contract' entered into between the borrower and the lender (banks and financial institutions) that regulates the terms of a loan. The loan agreement comes into picture immediately after the bank appraises your credit and the property that you have identified.

The agreement and the fine prints...

In the euphoria to acquire that dream house, various clauses in the loan agreement are often overlooked. However, these clauses have a significant bearing on areas ranging from interest rates to repayment schedules. Reading home loan agreements is generally viewed as a sheer formality and one always tends to ignore points that the agreement mentions. Moreover, the legal language used in the document often seems more alien than human!

In any case, not reading a loan agreement thoroughly can land you in a soup. Here are some clauses, which should be searched for inside a loan agreement and be clarified with your HFC (Housing Finance Company):

Reset Clause on Fixed Rates: Banks have introduced the reset clause in their fixed rate, home loan agreements so that they can increase interest rates in case the market rates increase in future. This effectively makes fixed rate loans equivalent to floating rate ones. This gives the banks an escape from interest rate surges but is a disadvantage for the borrower who is mostly unaware about such content in their agreement. Typically, the period for such reset clause varies from two to five years depending on the bank or housing finance company you borrow from. So read this clause in your loan agreement carefully.

Force Majeure Clause: There may be certain loopholes in your home loan agreement that allows the bank or home loan company to unfix and raise the fixed interest rate under exceptional circumstances. This will be mentioned under the 'force majeure' clause of your agreement. However, the differentiation between 'exceptional circumstances' and normal circumstances is always a tough task.

For e.g. A cut in banks' prime lending rate is not automatically translating into reduction of all PLR-linked loan rates. The reason being cited is that the bank's margins are under severe stress due to lending rate cuts. They feel interest rates on some existing sub-PLR loans do not even cover their cost of funds and any further fall in those sub-PLR loans will worsen the matter. Therefore, some public sector banks have revised the existing loan contracts in case of select sub-PLR borrowers, by using the 'force majeure' clause, meaning a 'situation beyond control'.