2.5 thousand construction companies have joined the Sber program to provide concessional mortgage support to developers issuing such housing loans. Alexey Leypi, director of Sberbank’s Domklik division, spoke about this issue at the bank’s conference for developers “Time for Change: Challenges 2024”.
“When the special military operation started in 2022, at a time when the interest rate increased to 20 percent and other banks stopped giving loans under the old conditions, when you look at it together, we gave loans for almost one more month in total. for socially vulnerable customers it took a month and a half.” – said Alexey Leipi.
According to him, this year the company, aware of its responsibility, continued to provide loans on the old terms.
“I will share the January results with you. Two-thirds of the loans given in January are given with government support. “These are loans given under old conditions,” added the company’s top manager.
He explained that the resulting excitement always leads to change. To correct the problem, Sber specifically gave its customers and partners the opportunity to sign contracts on the old terms and postponed the issuance until a later period.
“This is an important step that shows that we do not just talk, we act and take social responsibility upon ourselves,” Leipi said.
The director of the Domklik department also said that to date, offers have been signed with 2.5 thousand developers who have started working within the framework of subsidies.
“Within the scope of the new process, we started to export almost 1 billion per day at the end of January. Now we stand in front of a certain crossroads. Taking into account the use of a subsidy tool, we have a pessimistic estimate for a decrease of 83% and an optimistic estimate for a decrease of 37%. The market will tell what volumes we will be at in the next month or two. But it seems to me that in both cases we will have to wait for the regulator,” Leipi shared.
Previously, in September and December 2023, the Russian government reduced the amount of compensation for loss of income to creditors under concessional mortgage programs, which led to a loss of profitability by 1 percentage point.
The Central Bank also increased the required reserve ratio provision from October 2023; This led to an average 30% increase in capital allocated to mortgage loans and a further 0.3 percentage point reduction in lenders’ margins on average.
In order not to stop lending, Sberbank, after consulting with developers and at their request, introduced concessional mortgage subsidies.