The New Zealand housing market could be stabilising after months of trending low. Along with a benign outlook for interest rates, this could see banks tweaking interest rates in anticipation of rising demand.State-owned Kiwibank - usually a leader in interest rates - has already made the first move. This week it began offering a special lower rate on one-year fixed loans as it looked to gauge demand for new loans. Kiwibank cut its one-year rate by 30 basis points to match its floating rate and offer the best rate in the market.At its regular announcement of the official cash rate setting yesterday, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand kept the rate unchanged at 3.0 per cent. It  committed once again to keeping the OCR low until the recovery becomes more robust and underlying inflationary pressures show stronger signs of increasing.The RBNZ's statement was almost identical to its previous one, in December 2010. The only major variation was a comment on the housing market. It said there are "tentative signs" of the market stabilising.Attempting to kick-start the housing loan market via a change to the floating rate would have been the best option in a market where floating rate mortgages are gaining more favour. But banks in New Zealand seldom make changes to the variable mortgage rate without taking direct cues from the OCR.  A cut in the popular one-year term rate is therefore a viable way to draw in new customers. Home loans with a term of less than one year account for nearly 53 per cent of fixed rate mortgages, and nearly 30 per cent of total mortgages. Floating rate mortgages account for  44 per cent of total mortgages.Two years ago, floating rate mortgages accounted for just 16 per cent of total home loans. Of mortgages less than a year old, 46 per cent were fixed-rate mortgages, accounting for  about 39 per cent of total mortgages.Recent data on home loan approvals shows the number rising to 4,760 in the week ended January 21, from 4,220 the previous week.  The value of approvals also rose to NZ$615 million, from NZ$527 million the previous week.The stock of all home loans financed at the end of November 2010 stood at NZ$171 billion, up just two per cent from the same month a year earlier. This was the lowest rate of on-year growth since at least 1999 and well off the peaks of 17 per cent growth seen in 2004 and around 14 per cent in 2007.