 "home loans, property, loans, banks, credit")
Affordable housing-focused Home First Finance, which primarily taps first-time homebuyers, is bullish on the market and is on course to disburse 30 per cent more loans over the last fiscal to close this year at around Rs 5,600 crore.
The mortgage lender has been clocking a seven per cent growth in each of the three quarters of this fiscal, which saw its live loan book touching the Rs 5,000-crore mark in the December 2021 quarter, which was a record for the city-based firm.
It is hopeful of bettering it in Q4 helping it close the year with 30 per cent incremental sales, it added.
The lender reported a 189 per cent jump in net income at Rs 46 crore in Q3 as its disbursements touched a record Rs 570 crore, a growth of 63.3 per cent, taking the total loan book to Rs 4,994 crore, 26.7 per cent more than the same period in FY21 when it was Rs 3,941 crore.
"Our disbursals have been averaging seven per cent each quarter this year and the demand momentum is only going to increase in the March quarter going by the January numbers.
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"I am confident of closing the current fiscal with Rs 5,500-5,600 crore of the loan book. If the January momentum is continued through March, Q4 sales should top Rs 600 crore," its Managing Director and Chief Executive Manoj Viswanathan told PTI on Thursday.
His optimism comes from the near nil impact on both demand and collection so far from the third wave of the pandemic. "By December, those who had delayed payments came back to regular payments," he said.
Viswanathan added that the record disbursement in the third quarter came uniformly from across the six states the four southern states and Maharashtra and Gujarat where it primarily operates.
"The March 2021 quarter is looking strong going by the January numbers and we should be able to do better than Q3 now, selling over Rs 600 crore of additional loans," Viswanathan said.
Being an affordable housing only lender, its average ticket size is around Rs 10 lakh and the company has paid back Rs 600 crore in subsidies so far, he said.
It has onboarded 5,000 new customers in the third quarter taking the total count to over 60,000 now. Of them, as much as 75 per cent are from the low-income group and the economically weaker section. Home loans contribute 91 per cent to its total assets.
In Q3, its total income stood at Rs 152 crore, which grew 38 per cent over Rs 110 crore in Q3 of FY21, and 3.8 per cent sequentially at Rs 146 crore.
This was despite an increase in bad loans at 2.6 per cent in Q3, compared with 1.6 per cent a year ago, as the RBI revised the NPA guidelines for non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) to report 30-day past the due dates of defaults. This led to an additional Rs 34 crore as bad loans in Q3.
Home First was founded by Jaithirth Rao, P S Jayakumar and Manoj Viswanathan 11 years ago, as a digitally-driven affordable housing lender and now serves over 60,000 customers across 13 states. As much as 76 per cent of its customers are registered on its app and payments received via the app have gone up by 114 per cent.
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