New leadership in NMRC and expectations from mortgage market

The emergence of a new leadership at the Nigerian Mortgage Refinance Company (NMRC) early this month has raised fresh hope and expectations in the mortgage market that the fortunes of the struggling market might improve significantly.

Expectation is that with the experience, antecedents and strength of character of those who constitute the core of the new leadership, whatever was the knot that tied the refinance company and prevented it from meeting market expectations in the past four years would be untied and new heights attained.

Coming as a child of necessity in a mortgage environment where credit facility and liquidity drought was/is legendary, NMRC was received with open hands and dreamy heads by stakeholders, especially the home seeking Nigerians whose homeownership dreams have, over the years, been dashed by dearth of affordable housing finance.

Though a private sector-driven company, NMRC has the public purpose of developing the primary and secondary mortgage markets by raising long‐term funds from the domestic as well as foreign capital market for providing accessible and affordable housing in Nigeria.

Its mission is to break down barriers to home ownership by providing liquidity, affordability, accessibility and stability to the housing market. In line with this, the company, three years ago, raised N8 billion from the capital market with which it refinanced mortgages originated by primary mortgage lenders.

The benefiting mortgage institutions included Stanbic IBTC which got N1.8 billion and Imperial Homes, N1.7 billion. Other beneficiaries included Sterling Bank, N1.6 billion; Sun Trust Mortgage Bank, N1.3 billion; Trustbond Mortgage Bank, N700 million; and Homebase Mortgage Bank which got N500 million.

Adeniyi Akinlusi, CEO, Trustbond Mortgage Plc and a shareholder in the refinance company, is of the view that with this and a few other things, NMRC has a positive story to tell for its four years as a secondary mortgage institution.

“A lot of things are being done by the company. A major issue they have is that of land titling, but the company has been able to get some states of the federation to sign the model mortgage foreclosure law”, he informed, citing Lagos and Kaduna states which have keyed in.

“In Kaduna state today, it takes less than a week and 3 percent to perfect your title. A lot of things are being done; they may be moving slowly, but they are very impactful; the money given by NMRC to mortgage lending institutions are meant to expand home ownership and that is working”, he noted.

But both home seekers and close watchers of the mortgage market think otherwise. The impact of all these activities on affordable home seekers in the last four years remains to be seen. Mortgage interest rate remains high and so, mortgage is still inaccessible and unaffordable to those who really need it.

Nigerians are chronic optimists and that is why the leadership of the company led by Charles Adeyemi Candide-Johnson and Kehinde Ogundimu as chairman and managing director/chief executive respectively has raised expectations that better times are here.

Ogundimu is a thorough-bred finance professional who, according to Akinlusi, “is coming from the position of knowledge and experience” having been in the company since inception as chief finance officer (CFO) and acting managing director prior to this new appointment as managing director.

He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Ibadan and obtained an MBA from the University of Lagos. Ogundimu started his career at Price Waterhouse Coopers and subsequently worked in various capacities at Chevron Nigeria and in the Washington DC region at Pepco Energy Services, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and finally at Capital One Bank, where he was the Head of Debt, Derivatives and Securitization before joining NMRC.

Ogundimu’s stint at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae which are NMRC’s equivalent in the US places him in good stead to make NMRC realize its full potential and live up its vision ‘to be the dominant housing partner in Nigeria by providing liquidity and access to affordable housing finance’.

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae account for the high homeownership level in the US which is over 70 percent as opposed to Nigeria’s 10 percent. It is expected that Ogundimu will be able to bring his experience from that company to bear on his management of NMRC which, at the moment, owes Nigeria’s housing stakeholders a lot of explanations.

Candide-Johnson, who takes over from Charles Okeahalam was, until his new appointment, a non-executive director at NMRC and a senior partner at Strachan Partners, a leading commercial law firm based in Lagos and Abuja. He was called to the Nigerian Bar in July 1984 and conferred with Senior Advocate of Nigeria in September 2003.

He received an LL.M Degree from the University of London in 1985 and between 1984 and 1990 was Counsel in the leading chambers of Jon B. Majiyagbe in Kano, Nigeria. He moved to Lagos in 1990 to establish the Lagos practice of that firm and in 1994 led the founding of Strachan Partners.

Both Ogundimu and Candide-Johnson have come to NMRC with wealth of experience acquired over the years, and are expected to oversee the affairs of the company with a clear mandate to grow the primary and secondary mortgage markets and promote home ownership in Nigeria.

Is also expected in the mortgage market that the new leadership should sustain some of the good initiatives of the former leadership such as ‘Housing/Mortgage Market Information Portal (MMIP)’which is aimed to enable the company to gather data for intelligence and profiling of federal, states civil servants and informal sectors (off-takers) for affordable housing.

MMIP, according to officials of the company, is an effective policy and decision making tool on land allocation, infrastructure and concessions which enables decision on creating polycentric cities in order to decongest major urban centres.

Another initiative is the Mortgage Market System (MMS) which is a transformational change that integrates the entire housing market, covering construction finance, primary and secondary mortgage. The system, which is available to all players in the housing industry, has the benefit of removing duplications of efforts in gathering data and documents; improving the turnaround time, reducing the cycle time of transactions and helping in making homes more affordable.