By Yinka Kolawole

The Nigerian Mortgage Refinancing Company (NMRC) said it has refinanced hundreds of housing projects in the country with the injection of N6 billion into the mortgage market. Managing Director of NMRC, Prof. Charles Inyangete, disclosed this during the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between NMRC and the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). With the deal, NBS will carry out survey that would provide data on the housing sector that will enable NMRC make informed decisions regarding the refinancing of mortgages.

Inyangete also remarked that in order to attract more investors into the housing sector, NMRC had signed foreclosure agreement with some state governments to ensure that investors in the sectors operate on a level playing ground and also understand their operating environment. The NMRC boss said since the company commenced 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.

Long-term finance

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. We would not refinance any mortgage that doesn’t meet that standards .We would not also refinance an entity that doesn’t operate to a level that is satisfactory to us,” he said.

Inyangete signed the MoU on behalf of NMRC while the Statistician General, Dr Yemi Kale, endorsed the document on behalf of NBS.  In his remark, the Statistician General said the MoU would enable the NBS provide quality and accurate data for the housing sector towards making the NMRC management take informed decisions.