Originally Posted by
Cash Money Hoes
Highlights:
Financing up to 50 years amortization and 95% loan to value. Rates will be on the lower end of offered rates.
Points based system with points awarded on basis of affordability, accessibility and energy efficiency. You need 100 to get the highest leverage and longest amortization. You get something like 70 points for freezing rental rates at 30% of the median income in the area you build for 10 years (only need to freeze 25% of units in project, but there are stipulations to stop people from gaming which units are rent controlled. In Calgary it's like $1700 per month. Meeting energy efficiency guidelines for the high efficiency heating equipment gets you like 30. If you don't get to 100 points you can still get pretty favourable financing terms. May drop amoritzaton to 40 years and 90% LTV for 70 points.
Process is to put application forward to CMHC. Takes 12 weeks last I heard. When approved you then shop your project to a lender who will then enter into loan agreement with you. You can then take draws for construction milestones.
There exist opportunity to get land put in a market value so you can actually cash out a significant portion of land value prior to completion (if you have historic land cost or have seen land increase through upzoning.... R-CG). The project proforma also allows you to carry construction interest expense, soft costs and management wages in your construction financing.
Bottom line is that this opens the door to those with not much capital (or experience although they do ask for development experience during application - not sure what qualifies) to build.
I cant remember what the threshold for project size under this program but it may be as low as 8 units per project. If its 8, the value of decent 50+' lots will sky rocket as they are now valued on basis of being able to build 8 units with huge leverage.
Either way will be interesting to see what gets built now that the city of Calgary has mic dropped the development review process.
Calgary is going to look like the Favelas of Rio.