Kingston, Jamaica — 22 May 2024
The National Housing Trust is actively seeking to expand its Developers Programme — a joint venture framework introduced in 2019 under which the NHT provides land while private developers secure financing, complete designs, and obtain necessary planning approvals. Under the programme’s terms, the NHT purchases 80 per cent of the completed housing units, with developers retaining the remaining 20 per cent for open market sale. The model is designed to mobilise private sector construction capacity and balance sheet toward affordable housing delivery while allowing the NHT to expand its output beyond what its own direct programme can achieve.
The 2024-25 fiscal year joint venture programme is projected to deliver 1,349 solutions, forming a meaningful component of the NHT’s overall target. For the 2026-27 fiscal year, the joint venture pipeline is projected to deliver 1,624 solutions. Large private developers including Gore Developments, WIHCON, and Select Homes have already committed to providing approximately 4,000 homes on Jamaica’s north coast under developer partnership arrangements — commitments that demonstrate the appetite among established private developers to work within the NHT framework at scale.
How the Developer Programme Works
The mechanics of the developer partnership reflect the NHT’s structural advantage: land. The Trust holds significant land banks accumulated over its nearly five decades of operation. Land in appropriate locations for housing development is among Jamaica’s most constrained inputs — particularly in the Kingston Metropolitan Area, Portmore, and the north coast corridor. Private developers who cannot access suitable land at affordable prices are blocked from delivering affordable housing regardless of their construction capability or balance sheet.
By providing NHT-owned land as the development site, the programme allows developers to use that land as collateral for construction financing, removing the land acquisition cost from the development equation and enabling housing to be delivered at prices that NHT contributor-borrowers can afford. The NHT’s commitment to purchase 80 per cent of units provides demand certainty that conventional off-plan pre-sales cannot guarantee, making the programme’s economics more predictable for developers than fully speculative residential development.
The Critique: Cash Over Construction
The developer partnership programme has been introduced against a backdrop of sustained criticism of the NHT’s own direct construction programme. A Jamaica Observer analysis in April 2024 characterised the NHT as “building cash, not housing” — a reference to the Trust’s substantial accumulated surplus and investment portfolio relative to its housing delivery output. The NHT delivered 1,627 solutions in 2023 — a figure far below the targets announced in annual budget addresses. The 15,009 solutions targeted for commencement in 2024-25 represent an aspiration significantly beyond recent delivery rates.
The developer programme is partly a response to this delivery gap. If the NHT’s own direct programme cannot scale sufficiently quickly to meet announced targets, mobilising private sector capacity through structured partnerships is a logical mechanism for closing the gap. Whether the programme can be administered at sufficient scale — identifying developer partners, structuring agreements, managing construction oversight, and processing the 80 per cent purchase commitments — remains the operational test.
“The developer partnership model is the right idea, and the NHT’s land bank is its most underleveraged asset,” said Dean Jones, Managing Director of Jamaica Homes. “If you can unlock private sector construction capacity by providing land certainty and purchase certainty, you can potentially multiply the NHT’s effective housing output without proportionally multiplying its own staffing or capital expenditure. The question is execution — these partnership arrangements are more complex to manage than direct procurement, and the NHT’s institutional capacity to manage a large developer programme at scale is what needs to be demonstrated.”
The National Starter Home Programme
The developer programme connects to the National Starter Home Programme for young Jamaicans, announced by the Prime Minister in March 2024. The starter home initiative — which targets under-35 contributors with a 10 per cent deposit requirement and access to NHT lending at concessionary terms — creates a ready demand cohort for developer programme units. If the Developers Programme can supply the units and the Starter Home Programme can qualify young buyers for the financing, the two initiatives together address both the supply and demand sides of the first-home equation simultaneously.
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