Australian Housing Urban Reasearch Institute (AHURI) research informs Treasurers’ affordable housing plan
In recent news, Treasurer Scott Morrison has visited London to confer with British officials on the UK experience implementing a bond aggregator model to fund affordable housing.
AHURI research into a bond aggregator model for affordable housing was central to the Affordable Housing Working Group (AHWG) report to Australian Federal, State and Territory Treasurers meeting during the Council on Federal Financial Relations. As a result, the Council recommended establishing an expert taskforce to design a bond aggregator model.
What is a bond aggregator?
The model is based on AHURI research into the creation of an Affordable Housing Finance Corporation (AHFC). The AHFC is designed to aggregate and source large amounts of capital from the bond market so as to provide lower interest, long-term loans to not-for-profit community housing providers (CHPs) developing housing for lower income households. The intention is that money would be raised efficiently with reduced financing costs rather than in expensive one-off transactions such as when borrowing from a bank.
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