KCB Rwanda’s mortgage loan book has grown to Rwf 4 billion since its launch in March this year.
Maurice Toroitich, the Bank’s Managing Director said that the recent growth in real estate sector in the country is expected to push demand for the bank’s mortgage business by up to 300 percent in the next three years.

"The demand for our mortgages is high and we can hardly meet it; so the challenge is how to raise funds consistently,” he said in Kigali last Friday, during the signing of a memorandum of understanding between the bank and COHAKI- an association that brings together members seeking home ownership.

 "We have expertise in the mortgage business and we are coming with resources so that people could be able to own houses,” he said, adding that the bank is committed to ensuring that it is part and parcel of deepening mortgage business in Rwanda.

The chairman of the association, Innocent Mwambaye, said that the association with 635 members had asked the bank to finance its members to put up houses on the 20 hectares of land they recently acquired.

He said that the association would start the first phase with 100 units with each costing between Rwf 47million  and Rwf 27 million. Mwambaye said that five construction companies had been contracted to build the housing project.

"Renting has been expensive for me and I  realised earlier on that I was just feeding someone else even though I knew that through facilitation such as what KCB offers,  I can save and eventually build my own house”, Innocent Nkeshimana, a member of the group told Business Times.

However, one of the factors that hampers the drive for more Rwandans to own homes is the high costs of construction. Dilup Kumar Narayana, the project engineer at Torosis Rwanda Construction Ltd said that several types of construction materials are imported at a high cost thereby pushing the building costs to levels unaffordable to many Rwandans.

Nkeshimana said that members were not required to give guarantees for the mortgages and pay back between Rwf 280,000 to Rwf 600,000 a month to the bank depending on the house they want to build which he said is more convenient than renting.

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