Our monitoring systems have picked up that HSBC is launching a hot new range of mortgage 'specials' for its Premier home loan offer.

The HSBC website now confirms that their new offer is 3.35% for all fixed terms from one to five years.

They are effective on Monday, September 2, 2019.

It is easily the lowest rates in the current mortgage market, and kicks off the spring real estate season in an aggressive fashion.

You qualify for HSBC Premier benefits if you have: a minimum of NZ$500,000 in loans; and/or a minimum of NZ$100,000 in savings and investments. Or If you are an overseas HSBC Premier customer you will automatically qualify for Premier customer status in New Zealand. After qualifying as a Premier customer, minimum home loan values no longer apply, although other home lending criteria may still need to be met. Existing HSBC Premier customers must borrow at least an additional NZ$100,000 to access these rates.

Earlier this week, most large banks cut rates and Kiwibank adopted a rate-set that was below 4% all the way out to a five year fixed term. No other major has followed that, but now HSBC has.

And the week also ended with wholesale swap rates dipping again, and again to all-time low levels.

For HSBC this is important because 40% of their total funding is wholesale ("related party" plus their debt security program) and less than half the rest is from local savings and term deposit balances. HSBC in New Zealand is a branch of HSBC in Hong Kong. To match them, other banks will now need to be even more aggressive with their savings and term deposit rate cuts. Both ANZ and BNZ pushed through such savings account cuts yesterday, although to levels that will be hard to be reduced further. Term deposit savers will now be in the cross-hairs. [This paragraph has been updated.]

Here is the full snapshot of the advertised fixed-term rates on offer from the key retail banks with the new HSBC offers included.

In addition to the above table, BNZ has a unique fixed seven year rate of 5.70%.

All carded, or advertised, term deposit rates for all financial institutions for terms of less than one year are here, and for terms of one-to-five years are here. And term PIE rates are here.