WILL BANKS FI­NANCE COUN­TRY HOMES?

NHB to con­sider lend­ing once pol­icy is no­ti­fied

HT Estates - - Front Page - Van­dana Ram­nani

Farm­houses to­day are agri­cul­ture land and hence can­not be con­sid­ered for hous­ing loans dis­bursed by banks. It re­mains to be seen whether coun­try homes, to come up in the green belt of Delhi’s Mas­ter Plan 2021, will be treated as hous­ing units once the new pol­icy is no­ti­fied by the min­istry of ur­ban de­vel­op­ment and adopted by the state gov­ern­ments.

Ac­cord­ing to R V Verma, chair­man and man­ag­ing direc­tor, Na­tional Hous­ing Bank, the apex in­sti­tu­tion for hous­ing fi­nance in the coun­try, once the coun­try homes pol­icy is no­ti­fied by the min­istry of ur­ban de­vel­op­ment, and adopted by the state gov­ern­ments, “we will con­sider per­mit­ting lend­ing for these units. For the coun­try homes to be con­sid­ered for hous­ing loans, they need to be recog­nised by the gov­ern­ment as le­gal units. Only if they sat­isfy and con­form to all plan­ning reg­u­la­tions and laws, they will be treated as le­gal units to be fi­nanced by the for­mal fi­nan­cial ma­chin­ery — the banks and the hous­ing fi­nance com­pa­nies. The in­fra­struc­ture in the area — san­i­ta­tion, wa­ter supply and elec­tric­ity also need to be de­vel­oped and le­galised si­mul­ta­ne­ously.”

“If banks start dis­burs­ing hous­ing fi­nance to coun­try homes, it will open new av­enues, an en­tirely new as­set class for banks to fi­nance. Once they are recog­nised as a for­mal hous­ing as­set class for which hous­ing fi­nance is al­lowed, FDI com­pli­ance may also kick in even­tu­ally,” points out Anckur Sri­vast­tava of Gen Real Ad­vis­ers.

As per the FDI guide­lines un­der chap­ter 6, FDI is not al­lowed for ag­gre­gat­ing agri­cul­ture land. It re­mains to be seen how FDI can be at­tracted into com­pli­ant projects ex­ceed­ing 50,000 sq m of built-up space, Ramesh Menon, direc­tor, Certes Realty Limited.

The pol­icy on farm­houses/coun­try homes passed by DDA has two com­po­nents. One part deals with reg­u­lar­is­ing the ex­ist­ing farm­houses, gen­er­ally of size 2.5 acres and above and the other al­lows for con­struc­tion of coun­try homes on a min­i­mum plot size of one acre. It lays down that “all ex­ist­ing farm­houses in the pro­posed ur­ban ex­ten­sion area that had come up prior to Fe­bru­ary 7, 2007 and also those where sanc­tions had been sought prior to Fe­bru­ary 7, 2007, but ac­corded af­ter the date by the reg­u­la­tory author­ity shall be reg­u­larised and re­des­ig­nated as coun­try homes.” The pol­icy is yet to be ap­proved by the min­istry of ur­ban de­vel­op­ment.

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from India

© PressReader. All rights reserved.