There has been talk about the need to launch green project financing and green mortgages for a long time, but at the federal level everything is still at the level of discussions. Perhaps specific steps by market players will help to move from words to deeds
In early April, Beber announced the launch of a green mortgage*, focused on the purchase of apartments in houses that meet the standard of ecological construction. As explained in the bank, developers whose residential complexes belong to the highest energy efficiency classes (A, A+, A++; the class is indicated in the project declaration of the house) will participate in the program, and therefore consume less energy and allow residents to save money when paying for housing and communal services.
For buyers of apartments in such houses, the mortgage rate will be reduced by 0.3 percentage points for the entire loan term. However, there is an important caveat: the discount does not apply to mortgage programs with state support, which currently account for a large proportion of loans. According to Alexander Vedyakhin, First Deputy Chairman of the Board of Sberbank, “this program is also designed to help in the fight against irrational consumption and will allow customers to contribute to the improvement of the environment.”
About a year ago, in a conversation with BFM.ru Director for Sustainable Development and International Cooperation “Dom.Marina Slutskaya noted that a single mechanism for preferential green mortgages for the purchase of apartments in apartment buildings conforming to GOST R 70346-2022 (which was developed by Dom.The Russian Federation”, approved by Rosstandart and entered into force on November 1, 2022), has not yet been launched, but there are prospects for its appearance. What has changed over the past year?
Marina Slutskaya: The definition of a green mortgage is fixed at the level of the taxonomy of the government of the Russian Federation from the position of the methodological center supporting it. The real estate object must comply with the national standard in the field of green construction (let me remind you that the standard for green apartment buildings has already been approved, the standard for individual housing construction is planned to be approved this year) or have an energy efficiency class not lower than A. Thus, the criteria for a green mortgage are universal for all market participants. At the moment, the state, the regions and the Bank of Russia have not yet introduced measures to support green mortgage lending, each bank independently determines both the expediency of including its own products in the line and the parameters of a green mortgage: a reduction in the interest rate compared to standard mortgage products, an initial payment, a term, and so on. These parameters are determined based on the bank’s risk assessment, taking into account the bank’s goals and ambitions, as well as the bank’s budgets in the field of sustainable development. In general, the launch of a green mortgage is an excellent opportunity for the bank to increase the share of green assets in its own loan portfolio and support the implementation of projects that make a significant contribution to reducing energy consumption, and therefore to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants into the atmosphere. The development of the market of green mortgage products, even by individual market players without support measures from the state and regulators, is a positive phenomenon, which indicates that home buyers, developers and banks pay close attention to the quality of houses under construction and the possibility of optimizing resource consumption and utility bills throughout their lifetime.
What are the main rules, in your opinion, should be included in the rules for issuing a green mortgage?Marina Slutskaya: First of all, in order to ensure the achievement of a positive economic effect for home buyers in terms of reducing resource consumption and utility bills, as well as a real environmental effect at the city, country and planet levels, banks need to ensure effective communication with developers when selecting housing complexes for green mortgages. Here, special attention should be paid to the quality of housing construction, so that all technical solutions necessary to achieve an energy efficiency class not lower than A are actually implemented during construction and buyers receive housing with the quality characteristics that were stated in the project declaration. The second extremely important aspect is the availability and quality of information on housing construction, including energy efficiency. Here we advocate expanding the number of “high-quality” fields of the project declaration, which allow potential buyers to form an opinion about the characteristics of the object under construction, and the Bank of Russia supports us in this. The third component of success, in our opinion, is the work of the bank’s client managers, who offer mortgage products to buyers. The manager should be able to explain to the client in an accessible way what a green, or energy-efficient, house is, what are the advantages of such housing for the buyer, where the buyer can view the list of complexes included in the green mortgage program, and so on. In other words, it is important that client managers have knowledge in the field of sustainable development and green construction. This is the only way they can help the client make an informed choice of a mortgage product. Today, each of us is used to looking at the energy consumption of equipment when buying conditionally refrigerators and washing machines, however, not everyone thinks about the energy efficiency of the housing in which they live, and this is a huge area for work “Home.Russian Federation” and commercial banks.And yet, do you think that the rules of green mortgages should certainly be adopted at the federal level and become uniform for everyone? Or does each bank still have the right to decide for itself whether to issue such a mortgage and on what terms?Marina Slutskaya: Currently, common approaches have already been defined at the federal level. Additionally, they are likely to be fixed in the preparation of mortgage lending standards, which we are involved in working on. It is important to emphasize that “The House.The Russian Federation” as an institute for development in the housing sector considers it necessary to implement a program of green mortgages and green project financing of housing construction at the federal level with the allocation of an appropriate subsidy and/or with special regulation by the Bank of Russia, because this will allow a comprehensive approach to improving the quality of housing, reducing the burden on engineering infrastructure and the need for technological capacities, optimizing resource consumption and preserving the ecology of cities. Green mortgages and project financing will support green construction on the supply and demand side and will become the basis for improving the energy efficiency of the housing stock, which means that they will ensure resource savings on a national scale in the medium term. At the same time, the absence of a single preferential program is not a restriction for banks to launch their own programs (taking into account those features of interaction with developers and home buyers that were noted earlier). The proactive position of developers and banks is of great importance for the development of the green building market, as well as the involvement and increase of public interest.
According to Marina Slutskaya, “point programs and products that have already been launched by banks will serve as an experience for building a federal subsidy program. Bank employees at all levels will already have basic knowledge in the field of green building criteria, which will facilitate the rapid launch of the program nationwide.”
What do developers think about the Sbera initiative? “We see a constant increase in demand for eco-friendly homes. The green mortgage of Sber is a very important step in order to make environmental friendliness a basic requirement for residential projects in our country. We are very optimistic about the prospects of this instrument,” said Pavel Shevchuk, CEO of Ingrad Group, which was one of the first, if not the first, to announce that it was joining the Savings program*.
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Do other market players share this optimism? Do they think that the discount of 0.3 percentage points announced by Sberbank is sufficient to bring the interest of developers and buyers in energy-efficient homes to a new level? What other criteria for a green mortgage, in their opinion, should be included in federal legislation? We’ll talk about it next time.
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