NMRC in ambitious initiatives for mortgage market, affordable housing

In response to its vision to be the dominant housing partner in Nigeria, by providing liquidity and access to affordable housing finance, the Nigerian Mortgage Refinance Company (NMRC) has come out with ambitious and innovative initiatives aimed to improve mortgage market transactions and also fast-track affordable housing delivery.

The secondary mortgage institution believes that the inequality created by lack of affordable housing in Nigeria places a moral obligation on all housing stakeholders to use every tool at their disposal to find solutions to providing access to sustainable affordable housing finance.
The company which regards itself as a private sector-driven company with the public purpose of developing the primary and secondary mortgage markets by raising long‐term funds from the domestic capital market as well as foreign markets for providing accessible and affordable housing in Nigeria, is arguably, one of Nigeria’s first successful partnerships between the private financial sector and the public sector.
“Our mission is to break down barriers to home ownership by providing liquidity, affordability, accessibility and stability to the housing market in Nigeria”, revealed Charles Inyangete, the company’s MD/CEO, who spoke at the just concluded Real Estate Unite (REU) conference organised by 3Invest Limited in Lagos.
Consistent with its mandate to promote wider spread of home ownership, accessibility and affordability in Nigeria, the NMRC has set up what the CEO called ‘Housing/Mortgage Market Information Portal (MMIP)’ to enable it to gather data for intelligence and profiling of federal, states civil servants and informal sectors (off-takers) for affordable housing.
“This is an effective policy and decision making tool on land allocation, infrastructure and concessions; it enables decision on creating polycentric cities in order to decongest major urban centres”, he disclosed, adding that pilot implementation of the initiative was already taking place in six cities including Abuja, Lagos, Kano, Bauchi, Enugu, Port Harcourt.
Another initiative the company has come up with is the NMRC 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 effort in gathering data and documents; improving the turnaround time, reducing the cycle time of transactions and helping in making homes more affordable.
It is hoped that the use of the system for federal and state governments mortgage asset registry will reduce cost of homeownership; eliminates breaks in the chain of title; improve hard naira savings on each loan for homeowners and lenders, and reveal identity of servicer and investor available to homeowners via phone or internet.
Experts at the annual conference which focused on ‘looking inwards and had as theme, ‘Filling the GAPS in real estate’ decried the housing situation in Nigeria and urged the government to step up its role in enabling the environment for housing delivery.
Ruth Obih, the 3Invest CEO, explained that GAPS was an acronym for ‘Government-Access-Private Sector-Strategy, stressing that “this is time for us to go back to the drawing board; the citizens have to be a lot more patriotic and need to think more about the country than themselves”.
Highlighting the gaps in the housing sector, Ayuli Jemide, a corporate and commercial lawyer, listed land tenure, mortgage system, and land titling and registration are critical, describing them as sub-optimal, stifling and archaic.
He noted that housing is a social contract between citizens and government, adding that it is a constitutional right in Nigeria and, therefore, ‘’government is obliged to provide suitable and adequate shelter; we should insist that government plays its role in bridging the housing deficit”.
“Whilst private sector investment in housing is imperative, government must lead by providing adequate frameworks and incentives, particularly with affordable housing”, he insisted.

CHUKA UROKO