Ilshat Gimaev took part in the visiting meeting of the Committee on Housing Policy and Infrastructure Development

The issues of shared-equity construction of apartment buildings using escrow accounts were discussed today at a visiting meeting of the Committee on Housing Policy and Infrastructure Development. The meeting was held at the site of the Gran construction company. Deputy Minister of Construction, Architecture and Housing and Communal Services of the Republic of Tatarstan Ilshat Gimaev, representatives of banks took part in the meeting together with deputies.

Before the meeting, the participants got acquainted with the construction of the residential complex "New Hills" in Kazan. We examined the apartments in which the finishing has been completed. The deputies asked about the situation with infrastructure and parking spaces.

The issues of shared-equity construction of apartment buildings using escrow accounts continued to be discussed at the meeting. A new mechanism for financing shared-equity construction using escrow accounts was launched in the summer of 2019. An escrow account is a special bank account that is opened for settlements between the buyer of an apartment in a building under construction and the developer. The developer receives the funds of shareholders from this account after the commissioning of the facility. This scheme of work has been revised in order to protect the rights of shareholders in connection with the possible bankruptcy of the developer. Currently, developers are building housing on their own and credit funds, the funds of shareholders are stored in Banks on escrow accounts until the facility is put into operation.

83 developers are operating in Tatarstan, 168 apartment buildings with a living area of 1 million 587 thousand square meters are being built. 78 developers are working on 156 objects using the mechanism of attracting citizens' funds using escrow accounts. Ilshat Gimaev said that a record number of housing was commissioned in Tatarstan last year. "We have introduced 3 million square meters of housing for the first time. This allowed us to take the first place in the Volga Federal District and the sixth in Russia in housing commissioning," he said.

Leonid Anisimov, the head of the construction company, shared his experience in project financing using escrow accounts. "With the use of escrow accounts, our company built 5 apartment buildings – 46.8 thousand sq.m. of housing," he noted. A number of proposals were also announced, which, in his opinion, would simplify the procedure for obtaining loans using escrow accounts. Among such measures, he called subsidizing interest rates on project financing of developers, the possibility of step-by-step disclosure of an escrow account, which involves partial transfer of funds to the developer as certain stages of construction of a residential building are completed, and not after the commissioning of the facility, as is currently the case.

At the end of the meeting, the chairman of the Committee on Housing Policy and Infrastructure Development, Alexander Tygin, noted that the escrow account system gave a positive result. "The committee was monitoring the issue of escrow accounts. Today we received confirmation that the system worked successfully, according to the ministry, banks, the developer," he said.