Reliable approach: how the housing and communal housing market will change in the new year

Next year, a new law will come into force regulating the construction of residential buildings under contractual agreements using escrow accounts. According to experts, it will have a significant impact on individual housing construction and the activities of contractors. Readabout how this segment of the real estate market is being transformed and what changes await customers and contractors in the Izvestia publication.

Three whales

The federal law "On the construction of residential buildings under construction contracts with the use of escrow accounts" will become effective in the country on March 1, 2025.

The new mechanism creates a guaranteed protection of the funds invested by the customer during the construction of a residential building, leveling the risks of losing money in case of default by the contractor and significantly reducing the risks of non-completion of construction of individual residential buildings.

The law contains three important points. The contractor, in order to be able to work with escrow accounts, must publish the necessary information on the portal build.dom.rf. The customer, in turn, must place funds (its own or borrowed) on an escrow account in one of the reliable authorized banks, the list of which is published by the Bank of Russia on its official website. It should be taken into account that if the contractor will build the house using loan funds, the escrow account must be opened in the same bank. The contractor will receive funds from the escrow account only after the title to the completed house is registered with the buyer.

- The practice of working with buyers of housing in apartment buildings has shown the success and reliability of the mechanism of project financing based on escrow accounts, which is quite helpful to the housing market, - says the head of the Department of Mortgage Lending at the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation Alexander Tsyganov - Moreover, in the case of using escrow accounts there is an opportunity to participate in preferential federal and regional mortgage programs (for example, family and IT-mortgage), which are now known and in demand among citizens. Therefore, in the first months of 2025, contractors have both time and expediency to solve organizational issues.

To do this, according to the expert, it is necessary to go through the procedure of registration on the portal and prepare data to be placed on it, including the planned projects and the bank with which the contract for working with project financing and escrow accounts has been concluded. In the future, this website will contain information on construction contracts concluded after March 1, 2025 and the timeliness of their execution.

The contractor can, by completing his profile on the website, in parallel start posting the designs of future individual residential buildings and apply to the bank for a revolving credit line to finance their construction in the future.

Transition period

It was important to support market participants during the transition phase - before the law on the use of escrow accounts in housing and housing construction came into force and in the first months after its final legislative approval. For this purpose, the DOM.RF development institute launched a program of preferential lending to contractors using this mechanism at a rate not exceeding 1% per annum.

- The company has allocated 1 billion rubles from its own funds for this purpose. Within the framework of this support measure, it is planned to reimburse banks' shortfall in income on preferential loans to contractors for the construction of about 1 million square meters of housing. Today, with the help of the program contractors have already provided financing for the construction of more than 1 thousand private houses with an area of more than 100 thousand square meters, which is about 15% of the total number of houses being built under contractor agreements with escrow accounts under preferential mortgage programs, - emphasizes the director of housing development DOM.RF Evgeny Kvasenkov.

One of the successes of the preferential program DOM.RF, as the expert notes, was the improvement of communication between banks and contractors. This has made it possible in a few months to achieve a significant increase in the percentage of approval of applications for corporate loans submitted by contractors (from 8.4% in July to 23.2% by the end of November 2024).

- Contractors are gradually learning how to interact effectively with banks, begin to speak the same professional language with them, and correctly generate management reports. As a simple but effective advice I can say that contracting organizations should start with loans in banks not small amounts, carefully service them and thus work for the future, forming a positive credit history and gradually increasing the creditworthiness of their business, - adds Kvasenkov.

He also notes that Russians are also interested in building under the new safe scheme.

- We are seeing a positive trend in the growth of the number of contractors and issued mortgages for residential housing with escrow. For example, under the "Family Mortgage" with escrow started construction of more than 7 thousand private homes, - emphasizes Evgeny Kvasenkov.

In anticipation of the new law coming into force, Russian banks offer contractors their own conditions for opening credit lines. Thus, the maximum credit limits vary: for example, Sber offers a non-revolving credit line up to 30 million rubles, DOM.RF Bank opens a line for several objects up to 500 million rubles. Collateral requirements are mostly determined individually. However, DOM.RF Bank provides a contractor with a credit line of up to RUB 50 million without collateral.

Subsidized interest rates of 1% are offered by Sberbank and Bank DOM.RF, standard rates in these credit institutions are 8.7% and 6%, respectively. While many banks offer to repay interest monthly, and some - at the end of the term at the disclosure of the account, Bank DOM.RF gives the contractor a choice of these two options.

Test passed

Those contractors who follow the trends of the individual housing construction market and its development and transformation, and already use the new mechanism, have an established opinion about it.

- We started preparing for the changes in advance and have already started building houses using the escrow mechanism. For this purpose, we opened a credit line in DOM.RF Bank, which was the first in the market to offer such a product for contractors of housing construction and now offers quite attractive conditions against the background of other banks, - says Vadim Yuldashev, Director of the construction company "Yuko".

In his opinion, the settlement through escrow accounts, which from March 1, 2025 will be finally fixed at the conclusion of contracts for the construction of individual houses, will certainly have a great impact on the market and make it more civilized and predictable.

- The escrow mechanism ensures uninterrupted financing of the contractor at all stages of construction. It will exclude cases that now occur frequently: some contractors in the fight for the client at the start knowingly underestimate the cost of the project, materials, as a result of which the client's funds are often not enough to complete the work, to fulfill obligations to the customer becomes impossible, - says Vadim Yuldashev. -.

The expert is sure that the new law will regulate such moments: contractors will receive funds from the escrow account for the completed volume, they will have to learn to calculate the financial model more effectively, the market will be balanced on the average cost characteristics, and competition will be based on the parameters of work quality.

- Unscrupulous builders will leave this segment. For customers-individuals, in turn, the contractor's work on the escrow mechanism is already becoming a certain mark of quality and confirmation of reliability and financial stability of the company and one of the main factors in choosing a contractor. Therefore, those who are now starting to work with this mechanism, by March will have already accumulated experience, competitive advantages and customers, - summarizes the expert.

In a word, those who are already working under the new scheme, are sure that it makes sense to open a credit line now in order to serve a large flow of customers under preferential programs with escrow from March 1 next year.

And one more innovation will appear under the new law from April 1, 2025: the contractor's work under the escrow contract will be exempt from VAT.