The National Housing Trust has funnelled $1.1 billion to private banks to subsidise its External Financing Mortgage Programme, according to Gleaner reporting based on a Sunday Gleaner query to the Trust. A further $1.3 billion in interest payments to financial institutions is projected for the 2025-26 fiscal year. On the surface, that looks like the NHT paying banks to do a job it could do itself. The actual logic is closer to a deliberate trade-off.
Under the three-year-old EFMP, participating financial institutions have disbursed $33.73 billion in mortgages as of December 2025. The NHT is effectively renting out its contributors mortgage book to commercial banks, subsidising the interest rate gap so the loans stay affordable, while keeping its own liquidity free to fund housing construction rather than tie it up administering individual mortgages.
The Trust has framed this as leverage rather than loss: the model enables it to draw on private-sector liquidity to expand housing delivery while financial institutions take on the administrative load of managing the mortgage, freeing the NHT to focus on construction financing for low-income developments. The Trust currently has more than 40,000 housing solutions at various stages of construction, though it has not disclosed a clear figure for how many new developments the EFMP itself has funded since launch.
The arithmetic only works if the long-term value of housing construction outpaces the short-term cost of the subsidy, a bet the Trust is effectively making with contributor funds. Whether that bet pays off will show up less in this years budget line than in how many of those 40,000 units are actually delivered, and at what price, over the next several years.
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