Specialized Finance: Housing Finance - https://www1.worldbank.org/finance/html/housing_finance.html

The demand for housing finance services is undergoing profound quantitative and qualitative changes in many countries of the world.  Three different but interacting forces are at work: 

• Accelerating urbanization requires housing finance systems capable of responding to a strong domestic demand. 
• Major technological and regulatory together with very significant financial innovations are making reforms in the financial sector and in mortgage finance both desirable and possible. Contractual savings reforms, the rise of new institutional investors and the development of capital markets are creating new opportunities to better manage mortgage market risks. 
• New directions in public policies, including urban policies, are redefining the public/private sector balance in the regulation and provision of most urban services.  New ways financing of social housing also aim to develop more sustainable programs that can reach social groups at risk.

Client countries request assistance in modernizing their housing finance sector in various ways:

• Strengthening primary mortgage markets, including resource mobilization as well as mortgage origination by improving the legal and regulatory framework
• Developing the primary mortgage market infrastructure including better instruments to manage financial risks
• Restructuring low or non-performing state-owned housing banks and specialized public programs
• Restructuring pension funds dedicated to housing in the process separating social housing subsidies from market finance
• Developing secondary mortgage market institutions to link housing finance to capital markets.

Housing finance services provided by the World Bank Group can take the form of loans and/or advisory services.  Typical areas of services are:

• Housing finance systems diagnoses
• Advice on the legal and regulatory framework for financing housing and strengthening the primary mortgage market
• Advice on the design of  housing finance reforms, including housing finance strategies for transition economies
• Restructuring of and loan support for the financing of social housing in market economies to improve its efficiency to reduce budgetary pressures and achieve targeted subsidies that do not undercut the growth of market based mortgage finance
• Development of financial linkages between housing finance and capital markets.  Alternative forms of secondary market institutions taking into account their path dependency on the structure of the primary mortgage market and the stage of development of bond markets
• Organization of educational seminars on housing finance