The building permit for the new building financed with the bank’s mortgage was actually delayed by several months due to objections. When the permit finally was granted, the bank was no longer prepared to grant the conditions originally agreed with the clients for the 10-year fixed-rate mortgage. It explained that it was a clear oral condition of the written mortgage agreement that the building permit had to be obtained within six months of signing it, otherwise the agreed conditions would have to be renegotiated.

The clients disputed the oral agreement alleged by the bank. There was no evidence of this in the documents. On the other hand, the contract had a clear written reservation, i.e. changes and adjustments to the contract had to be agreed in writing in order to be valid. In any case, the bank could not simply have unilaterally converted the fixed-rate mortgage into a two-year Saron mortgage.

During the long period of steadily falling interest rates, clients regularly submitted cases to the Ombudsman in which the valid conclusion of a fixed-rate mortgage was disputed. These included cases where there were actual misunderstandings. However, clients often did not understand that a fixed-rate mortgage can generally be concluded verbally and tried to cancel such agreements by arguing that they had not signed anything. The reason for this was often that they had subsequently received a more favorable offer from another bank.

When interest rates rose again, a small number of clients complained about banks that they felt were no longer willing to honor fixed interest rate conditions and were forcing them to take out more expensive financing. This case was one of them. The bank’s actions were not comprehensible to the Ombudsman on the basis of the documents. The delay of a building permit due to objections is a frequent occurrence. The Ombudsman would therefore have expected that such a condition for renegotiating the terms would have been clearly stated in the written mortgage agreement, especially since it also contained far less important conditions.

As the clients were very concerned about the bank’s behavior, they contacted the Ombudsman just a few days after submitting a detailed written complaint to the bank’s management. The Ombudsman discussed the case with the clients and recommended that they wait for the response to this complaint. A few weeks after this conversation, the clients informed him that the bank had changed its position in a meeting with them and granted them the originally agreed conditions after all. Intervention by the Ombudsman was therefore unnecessary.