AHML outsources the sale of apartments to intermediaries

The Agency for Housing Mortgage Lending (AHML) is changing its approach to managing non-core property - collateral apartments that it inherited from defaulting borrowers. According to experts, the new, more complex scheme will allow him to save on taxes.

Deputy General Director of the agency Alexander Shcheglov told the Kommersant newspaper that AHML is changing the way it manages the collateral apartments transferred to it. By the end of the year, the agency plans to create a special real estate closed-end mutual fund, to which it intends to transfer all the housing it inherited from defaulted borrowers.

Until now, AHML independently implemented it through its website. For borrowers purchasing mortgaged apartments directly from AHML, it offered special lending conditions: with a down payment of 30%, the loan rate was only 3/4 of the Central Bank refinancing rate (currently 6.5% per annum). But even despite such a bonus, the agency independently managed to sell less than half (800) of the apartments it received (more than 1.8 thousand) during its entire existence.

This result is associated with quite significant costs for maintaining unsold housing, the agency points out. Therefore, it is now planned to entrust the management of all collateral property to a professional management company. “Real estate management is a specific business that requires special skills and relevant experience,” explained Shcheglov. “For the agency, as a refinancing organization, such business is not core.”

At the initial stage, AHML plans to transfer 948 apartments in all Russian regions to the fund with a total value of 1.5 billion rubles. The management company will use all income from the sale of housing through closed-end mutual funds to purchase new apartments transferred to AHML.

The agency does not hide the fact that it had to resort to this method of working with the collateral property transferred to it, among other things, because it was not possible to find a realtor who would be able to sell housing throughout Russia. “In June 2012, the agency conducted an open request for proposals among companies willing to provide services for the sale of collateral property,” notes Shcheglov, “but not a single one of the real estate agencies submitted applications to participate in this tender, from which we concluded that For them, the sale of collateral is of no interest."

The agency intends to decide on a management company for the closed mutual fund by the end of January.

“Usually, closed-end funds are created with the aim of optimizing taxes,” notes Raiffeisen Capital expert Elena Klimanova. “After all, the main advantage of such funds is a reduced property tax rate. In addition, they pay income tax only after paying income to their shareholder, whereas in this case there will be no payment: the income will be used to purchase new assets."