Homebase Mortgage raises fresh hope for homeownership, offers 20-year loan facility

Homebase Mortgage Bank Limited, a frontline primary mortgage bank (PMB) in Nigeria, has raised fresh hope for Nigerians who want to buy or build their own homes through mortgage loan with its offer of mortgage loan facility repayable in 20 years at low interest rate.

The company says prospective loan seekers who have all the requirements can access up to N50 million from it, adding that anybody seeking thir loan must have guaranteed monthly income that can repair the loan and must also have 20 percent equity contribution while the property he wants to buy must have  a good or mortgageable title.

Recently, the Nigerian Mortgage Refinance Company (NMRC) disbursed N500 million to Homebase Mortgage by way of refinancing the bank, making it the second bank to be refinanced after Imperial Homes Mortgage Bank which was refinanced to the tune of N1 billion late last year.

 “We are going to use this money as mortgage loan to Nigerians. Our core business is enabling people to own their own homes. So, whatever money we get, we are going to loan it out to people who have viable income to buy their homes”, Femi Johnson, Homebase MD/CEO, assures.

Johnson, who is also the President, Mortgage Banking Association of Nigeria (MBAN), said they would be catering to all Nigerians because, as he put it, “we are not a mortgage bank for the rich, middle class or the poor alone. We cover all strata of the society even though we have our bias for the low and middle class because, at this level, the money can touch more lives and more Nigerians”.

To qualify for the N500 million loan, the CEO revealed, NMRC had to look into their books critically, scrutinized their processes, corporate governance, risk management, structures, internal control processes, among others, stressing, “they also reviewed all these thoroughly before the money was released to us, and that was because they don’t disburse money to some people not because such people don’t have loans but because their processes are not clean”.

Johnson believes that in order for mortgage operators to do mortgage origination and do mortgage the way it should be done, they need a minimum of 20 year-type money at affordable interest rate, saying it was this belief that made his bank to invest in NMRC.

“Essentially, we are shareholders in NMRC; we are one of the banks that invested in the company and we did that because we understand that long term fund is core to our business”, he said, adding, “we pushed for the formation of NMRC and we are happy with the support government has given to the company to ensure it came into lime light”.

Continuing, he said, “we are pushing to ensure that what we planned the company to achieve is achieved and, in line with that, what we have done now is our first refinance of loans with NMRC and that has made the company to disburse up to N500 million to refinance our first set of loans”.

Based on the capital Homebase  has in NMRC now, it is allowed to refinance up to N20 billion, meaning that  it still has up to N19.5 billion with NMR that it can collect, and according to Johnson , “what this means is that we have that capacity and NMRC has the funding;  we are therefore calling on people who need mortgage loans to come forward and access this loan from us so that we can continue to refinance with NMRC”.