Putting houses within reach

THAT THRONGS of people attended Republic Bank Ltd’s Make Home Ownership Happen sales event earlier this month at the Trinidad Hilton in Port of Spain was not entirely unexpected.

The crushing need for more affordable housing is demonstrated by the 200,000 people still reportedly on the Housing Development Corporation (HDC's) waiting list and the fact that the HDC has, in a near-total collapse of the pretence of the viability of its allocation system, resorted to the gift of “lottery” draws for applicants in order to bolster goodwill.

However, the exercise conducted by the bank, in partnership with real-estate collator My Bunch of Keys, showed there’s a healthy interest in getting homes by avenues outside the State’s programmes, which have not only failed to keep up with demand but ignored the middle-income trap many people are in.

There’s a reason why millennials are seen as less likely to own homes than previous generations, despite the Ministry of Housing’s ludicrous claim on its website that “owning your first home has never been this easy.”

The Government would say it is already doing a lot for people with incomes that suggest they would be able to afford houses. This is, to some extent, beginning to bear fruit.

According to the State, real-estate mortgage lending grew by 3.5 per cent in November 2022, up from 2.9 per cent growth in June 2022.

Yet this was barely good news, and likely reflected a situation in which retrenchment had finally abated; loans for bridging finance and home improvement/renovation declined sharply by 9.3 per cent year-on-year in the third quarter of 2021. Single-digit growth will not make a real dent.

Government has been pursuing a lot of plans to try to jump-start things. The problem, however, is that these are exactly that: plans.

The HDC was split into three separate companies, while things went in the opposite direction for the financing companies, the TTMF and the HMB, now merged into the TT Mortgage Bank.

Whatever the advantages and disadvantages of this jumbled bag of realignment, there’s a distinct sense that it has all been, for the moment, much ado over little when it comes to a real change in people’s prospects.

The Government does make a lot of information available, through the websites of its various entities, which ostensibly allows "middle-income" people to get informed, make preliminary calculations and even book appointments. But it is an open question whether citizens feel confident enough to use any of this or whether they can even afford to muse over the possibilities with financial experts.

Republic Bank has run its housing programme alongside a similar exercise geared towards encouraging car ownership, effectively finding a way to bring more people through the door and start a conversation.

The State, which, after all, has a major stake in the bank, should take note of this approach and should encourage and support similar exercises to reach people all over the country.

It should also consider how it can, even in small, yet concrete ways, support financing mechanisms that are in place and to bolster demand for accessing them so that more people can step into housing stock currently standing empty.