The Nigerian Mortgage Refinancing Company on Tuesday in Abuja said it had so far injected the sum of N6 billion to the mortgage market in order to reduce the housing deficit in the country.
The Managing Director of NMRC, Prof. Charles Inyangete, gave the figure while speaking during the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the agency and the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
The MoU was signed in order to enable the NBS to carry out a survey that would provide data on the housing sector to be used by the NMRC to make informed decisions regarding the refinancing of mortgages.
Inyangete signed the MoU on behalf of the NMRC while the Statistician-General, NBS, Dr Yemi Kale endorsed the document on behalf of the NBS.
The NMRC boss explained that the agency had refinanced several hundreds of housing projects with the injection of the N6 billion.
He said since the NMRC commenced the refinancing of the mortgage sector, none of the loans given out had gone bad, noting that this is a testimony of the quality of its partners.
“We want to be the dominant housing partner in Nigeria and the key thing that we are supposed to do is to provide liquidity to the mortgage lenders and not directly to individuals.
“We have refinanced several mortgages and many more mortgages have been created.
“As we speak now, we are looking at a five thousand mortgage refinancing transactions which we are evaluating before going to the market at the end of this quarter.
“We have big designs and we are looking at substantially more because our programmes as approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission is about N140bn and so it’s quite a long way to go,” he said.
In providing finance for the mortgage sector, Inyangete said the agency had brought stability to the market through the issuance of longer-term finance.
“We believe that part of the biggest challenge today is to find an affordable home. So, we need to make sure that we help drive the process of bringing to reality the affordable homes.
“So, we are extending our activities to creating an environment that allows affordability to be a reality.
“We would not refinance any mortgage that doesn’t meet those standards. We would not also refinance an entity that doesn’t operate to a level that is satisfactory to us,’’ he said.
In order to attract more investors into the housing sector, Iyangete said the NMRC had signed a foreclosure agreement with some state government.
This, according to him, would enable investors in the sectors to have a level playing field and to also understand the environment they operate.
The Statistician General, NBS, Dr Yemi Kale said the MoU would enable the NBS to provide quality and accurate data for the housing sector towards making the NMRC management make informed decisions.
“We at NBS are always pushing for the importance of data. We are always trying to get policymakers and businesses to understand that data is important to ensure that their policies are based on evidence,’’ he said.
Source: Punch News
