VietNamNet Bridge – The recent moves by commercial banks of lending more capital to estate projects have brought high hopes to investors. However, analysts say the “exit door” remains too narrow for them.

In an attempt to push up lending, defrost the real estate market and clear bad debts, commercial banks have designed big credit programs to fund real estate projects.

BIDV, for example, has launched the credit package worth 6 trillion dong for the real estate sector. Of this, 2 trillion dong would be disbursed to fund individuals house purchases (the interest rate has been fixed at 12 percent per annum for the first three months) and 4 trillion dong for real estate project development.

ACB has designed a credit package worth 5 trillion dong, which would be provided to individuals to fund their house purchases for 20 years. Especially, borrowers can borrow up to 99 percent of the real estate products’ values and enjoy the grace period of up to 12 month.

Meanwhile, Eximbank has launched a 5 trillion dong worth of package for the individuals who have demand for accommodations.

Pham Linh, Deputy General Director of OCB Bank, said though the majority of the bad debts came from real estate projects, but the outstanding loans to the sector has just amounted to 4-5 percent of the total outstanding loans of the banking system, thus forcing banks to take the move.

As for OCB, Linh said, the bank has been not only trying to fund individuals’ house purchases, but also funding feasible real estate projects.

OCB has signed a credit contract on providing 80 billion dong in capital to Nam Long Investment JSC to fund the company’s project on Ehome 3 apartment block, expected to launch 2000 apartments to the market.

OCB has also funded a project by Ha Do Company, promising a loan worth 100 billion dong, while 50 billion dong has been disbursed so far.

BIDV, ACB, Vietcombank, VIB, Vietinbank and SeABank have committed a credit package of 20 trillion dong for the real estate market which would be disbursed in the period from now to the end of 2012.

Though the credit packages have been advertised well on mass media, the disbursement of the programs has been very slow.

The individuals, who want to borrow money to buy houses, top the banks’ lists of potential clients who have stable income from wages and salaries.

However, analysts believe that they should not be expected to become the main borrowers in the banks’ credit programs. The clients really have demand for accommodation, but they would not dare to borrow money to buy houses if they have to pay such high interest rates.

The other potential clients of banks are those who borrow money to build houses to lease to low income earners and workers in industrial zones, export processing zones or economic zones.

However, the group of clients is believed to account for a small percentage in the market, which means that the cash flow to the area would not be big enough to defrost the real estate market.

Real estate project developers prove to be the biggest clients. However, analysts believe that the amounts of money to be disbursed would not be high, because the investors cannot meet the requirements set by banks to access bank loans. If they had enough conditions to borrow money, they would not have to wait until now to ask for loans.

TBKTSG