Hundreds of Jamaicans chosen for NHT scheme housing over the past two years have been unable to take up the offer, according to the Trust, which cites its own debt service ratio rule as the sticking point: mortgage payments cannot exceed 33.3 percent of an applicant’s gross income, a threshold many selected applicants fail once their finances are actually reviewed at interview stage.
The scale of the mismatch is stark in at least one case. Carvel Stewart, president of the Incorporated Masterbuilders Association of Jamaica, said he was advised that out of roughly 10,000 applicants for a Clarendon scheme, only about 800 were actually qualified contributors once the DSR test was applied.
The NHT has declined to place unsold homes on the open market in the meantime, holding them instead for contributors further down the same applicant queue until it is exhausted. Prices across six affected schemes range from $1.5 million for serviced lots at Perth to $12.5 million for finished homes at Hellshire, a wide enough band that the qualification gap cannot be explained by pricing alone.
Something must be wrong with the qualification criteria, Stewart argued, a conclusion hard to avoid when barely eight percent of applicants for a single scheme actually clear the bar the Trust itself sets. Whether the fix is a different income test, better pre-screening before people apply, or something else, the current gap between interest and eligibility is large enough that hundreds of approved units are sitting empty while thousands of hopeful applicants are turned away.
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