Women form a substantial
portion of home loan applicants and should be more facilitated.
The indian housing finance
industry needs to gear itself up for an emerging customer segment – single working
women who wish to avail a home loan towards purchase or construction of own
home. Today, there are incrementally more women graduating in universities in
India. By 2020, 870 million more women will be employed in mainstream economy
working across the sectors in private in corporate India.
While the Indian mortgage
industry has been advocating for financial inclusion of lower and middle income
families, and rightly so, there are several sub segments within the overall
market – like single working women who dream of owning a home but are currently
underserved due various reasons.
Some of these are:
·
Fear of inability to serve the EMI after
marriage.
·
No suitable co-applicant.
·
Insistence on having a guarantor.
These are further accentuated
in case of separated/divorced/widowed women who find it extremely challenging
to avail finance towards purchase of home.
Flawed mindset
It has been a general mindset
which, at most of the times is not backed by any solid data, that as home
purchase requires a substantial amount of money, it may not be possible for a
single women to serve the repayment throughout the loan tenure. Hence, there is
an insistence of a co-applicant and a guarantor in the home loan application
made by single women. There are no regulatory norms / guidelines that preclude
any financial institution from providing mortgage finance to single working
women or beset any condition for processing the application. These, like any
other application are required to be processed purely on the basis of credit
eligibility, but are not done.
Primary applicants
The percentage of women as
primary applicants, currently though small in the loan books of financial
institutions, is now increasing. Also, almost one out of the two home loan
applications have co-applicant as women and their income is clubbed while
appraisal to enhance the loan eligibility. If loan originators catered to their
needs, working women class is set to be a huge customer segment offering
significant business proposition.
Facilities provided
The industry has started to
give attention to this emerging class of home loan borrowers. Most of the
financial institutions encourage the participation of working women, by
offering lower rates to women home loan borrowers and as such, even women
borrowers need to come forward and avail such benefits. A series of small but
significant steps need to be taken to bring the change, which would enable the
deserving women applicants to get the financial access towards realization of
their dream home on their own with as much ease as their male counterparts.
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