The Ministry of Finance has established a ceiling of 1.5 billion RON for guaranteeing real estate loans under the New Home programme in 2023, according to Agerpres.

„For the fifteenth consecutive year, the Ministry of Finance facilitates the purchase of a first home to Romanian citizens, by earmarking a significant ceiling to guarantee real estate loans under this programme, with the 2023 amount having been set at 1.5 billion RON. The amount proposed for 2023 is based on the analysis of the behaviour of banks and beneficiaries in the year 2022 and on the trends of the real estate market and mortgages forecast for the year 2023,” reads a press release of the Ministry of Finance on Friday.

Financing granted under this programme is provided in lei, for the purchase of a single home, and the maximum amount of credit that can be accessed is 66,500 euros – for homes whose price is a maximum of 70,000 euros, the requested advance being 5% and 119,000 euros – for homes whose price is a maximum of 140,000 euros, in this case the requested advance payment being 15%.

According to the explanatory note accompanying the draft normative act, 2022 was an atypical year when it comes to the real estate transactions financed through mortgage loans, characterized by a high degree of uncertainty, fueled on the one hand by the crisis generated by the war in Ukraine, and on the other by another part of the inflationary context and the galloping growth of the variable indices that are included in the structure of the cost of credits, which significantly reduced demand.

In 2023, it is expected that transactions in the real estate area will be influenced by several factors. In the hypothesis that the geopolitical context will stabilize, inflation will moderate, and variable indices will no longer have positive fluctuations, it is to be expected that the volume of transactions financed by mortgage loans will increase, in which sense it is proposed to allocate a total ceiling at the level of the year 2023, which can support the return of demand in this segment, underscored the Ministry of Finance.

Launched in 2009 under the name of Prima Casa (First Home), the government programme has so far collected 330,875 guarantees and guarantee promises totaling 31.3 billion lei.

Agerpres