It is proposed to expand the use of special escrow accounts in housing construction
In July, the Ministry of Construction prepared a draft law on raising funds from citizens in the construction of individual houses outside cottage settlements through escrow accounts: they plan to apply it to standard projects and house kits.
The bill regulates the relationship between citizens and contractors when using escrow accounts - from describing the terms of the contract to establishing a minimum three-year warranty period for the built house. Attracting citizens' funds by contractors using escrow accounts will be possible subject to several conditions:
- the contractor discloses information about himself and the project, and standard documentation or a house kit is used during construction;
- the contractor undertakes to connect the house to engineering networks, and in their absence, to provide autonomous engineering systems;
- the procedure for transferring an object and resolving disputes is regulated, and a minimum warranty period for built houses is set - three years.
Discussions on extending the project finance mechanism to individual homes have been under discussion for several years. Now, taking into account all support measures, including preferential loans, individual housing construction accounts for 10% of all mortgage loans, while this segment provides half of the annual volume of housing commissioning.
Olga Kalyuzhnaya, President of the Russian Forest Association: “In practice, the mechanism of escrow accounts for houses outside the complexes is already being used in a pilot mode. The construction market has been waiting for such an opportunity for a long time - due to the demand for individual housing construction. Innovations will increase the transparency of this segment and improve the quality of suburban development through the involvement of professional developers and standardization. Also, the innovation will ensure the availability of construction of private houses and the security of settlements”.
The initiative of the Ministry of Construction will give contractors the opportunity to expand their business - in particular, to attract those buyers who were afraid of the advance payment scheme.
