Question of the Day: why did Novosibirsk banks stop giving mortgages to military families?

Alexander Dybin

The problem with the issuance of loans for military personnel was announced at a meeting of the legislative assembly of the Novosibirsk region. The deputies adopted an appeal to the Russian government with a request to ensure the issuance of mortgage loans to participants in the military special operation. According to the deputies, members of the SVO, including volunteers and mobilized, cannot receive mortgage loans.

According to the Deputy Chairman of the Legislative Assembly Committee on Construction, Housing and Communal Sector and Tariffs Ilya Polyakov, a "difficult, unfair situation" has developed in this area.

“Participants of the SVO began to massively receive refusals to conclude mortgage agreements. The essence of what is happening: credit institutions have included military personnel and persons equivalent to them in the high-risk category. Banks are unwilling to take this risk, so they use every opportunity to refuse housing loans to participants in the special operation”, - Polyakov said. They were faced with the inability to obtain mortgage loans for the purchase of housing. It turns out that banks actually put military personnel on stop lists, reinsuring their interests. The fighters shed blood for the country, and they are denied the opportunity to take out a loan to buy an apartment!”

The Legislative Assembly notes that the presence of "stop lists" for the issuance of a mortgage was confirmed by analysts of the construction market and realtors.

“Banks generally drastically reduced the issuance of loans to men under 45,” said Yevgeny Pokrovsky, deputy chairman of the construction committee. - Their position is that if a citizen is of military age, then there are more risks that the loan may turn out to be unrecoverable. We would like to propose to the Russian government that it adopt a resolution that banks should not restrict lending on this basis”.

The deputies note that we are not talking about military mortgages, but about loans that volunteers or “other categories” are trying to get, which ones are not specified.

The deputies eventually supported the appeal to the federal authorities.

As the interviewed realtors noted to Novye Izvestia, apparently, the problem is relevant only for Novosibirsk.

“We didn’t have such refusals, just as there weren’t those who wanted to buy an apartment among the mobilized or volunteers, it’s rather strange to make real estate transactions while being called up”, - said the head of the mortgage department of a large agency in Chelyabinsk.

The director of the real estate company "Benois" from St. Petersburg, Dmitry Shchegelsky, also noted that he had not encountered any refusals for the military.

“My agency has not experienced this, but I heard that in late September and early October there were such problems. I didn't get rejected by the agency. At the same time, we had a client, a 25-year-old active military man with a service station in St. Petersburg. And they gave him a mortgage. – said the expert.