NHBs new guidelines to boost housing sector: Crisil

According to credit rating agency Crisil, the National Housing Bank’s (NHB) new and revised guidelines for housing finance companies (HFCs) will structurally strengthen the sector and increase investor confidence at a time when NBFCs are facing severe liquidity stress. This is so because the revised formwork made three key amendments including the minimum Tier 1 capital adequacy to be maintained by HFCs has been increased to 10 percent from 6 percent, while the overall Capital Adequacy Ratio (CAR) requirement has also been raised to 15 percent in a graded manner from the 12 percent earlier. In view of this, the maximum leverage that HFCs can take up has been reduced to 12 times from 16 over a period of three years. The ceiling on the deposits that HFCs can mobilize has been lowered to three times of net-owned funds from five times. Crisil’s analysis of 25 HFCs, which account for over 90 percent of the industry’s assets under management (AUM), shows that all of them comply with the 400 basis points (bps) higher Tier 1 CAR requirement announced by the NHB recently, said, Senior Director, Crisil Ratings, Krishnan Sitaraman, who added that stronger balance sheets and increased capital levels will make HFCs better placed to absorb asset-side risks in future.