INTERVIEW: Central bank wants to roll back cheap mortgage program

MOSCOW, Feb 3 (PRIME) -- Russia’s central bank stands for a gradual roll-back of the government’s 6.5% mortgage program, although it may be prolonged in some regions with a difficult situation on the housing markets, Yelizaveta Danilova, head of the regulator’s financial stability department, told PRIME on Wednesday.

“The low-rate program should be gradually rolled back to avoid excessive risks. It is important to track housing prices because they have grown fast over the past years, partially due to the increase of mortgage loans, partially due to the lack of supply of housing,” she said.

“We also see a problem in the cheap mortgage program losing its social direction, because we see lasrge investment demand for housing, especially in large cities.”

She said that housing is one of ways to channel savings for wealthy Russians.

“The more the prices grow, the more interesting these purchases become, especially when we have easy-term mortgages, which drive the prices up even more, so the initial ultimate goal of the program of making housing affordable to more people becomes unachievable,” Danilova said.

The program currently covers all types of borrowers in all regions of Russia, and the bulk of loans is provided in the regions with the highest pricing pressure – Moscow, the Moscow Region, St. Petersburg, the Leningrad Region, and the Krasnodar Region. The program may be prolonged in those regions, where the condition of the housing market is worse and where this program would be necessary, she said.

The initial deadline of the cheap mortgage program was November 1, 2020, but the government prolonged it until July 1, 2021. Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said that the government would decide on what to do with the program at the end of the first half of 2021.

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