The Board and Management of the Nigeria Mortgage Refinance Company (NMRC) wishes to announce the retirement of Professor Charles Inyangete as the Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of the company, after three and a half years of meritorious service, and upon having attained the mandatory retirement age of 60 years old.

Professor Inyangete joined the company in November 2014, following the incorporation of NMRC as a key component of the Nigeria Housing Finance Programme (NHFP) funded under a US$300 million IDA Facility from the World Bank Group. During his tenure he saw the growth of the company from a 3-man start up charged with launching unto a nascent and very challenging Nigerian Mortgage market with a clear mandate to grow the primary and secondary mortgage markets and promote home ownership in Nigeria to one which has made significant strides in the industry and recognised as an sector leader.

Achievements under his watch include the execution of NMRC’s first mortgage-backed bond issuance in July 2015, the very first of such in the whole of the African continent, as the first of a N440 billion bond issuance programme backed by an conditional guarantee of the federal government. The N8 billion raised from that exercise was deployed to the refinancing of legacy and new mortgages of NMRC member banks that conform to NMRC’s uniform underwriting standards for the formal sector, another transformative product developed by NMRC under his watch.

.Professor Inyangete was a proponent of the value chain approach to tacking the challenges facing a market comprising multi-faceted and complex operators, systems and processes along a supply and demand continuum.

Under Professor Inyangete NMRC took the lead in developing partnerships with state governments, as the points where the rubber meets the road in housing provision, including advocating for a draft Model Mortgage and foreclosure law to state actors for review and passage, as the fulcrum for a robust housing market and enhanced home ownership, which would not only benefit the citizenry but also impact state internally generated revenues.

Prof. Inyangete encouraged NMRC’s robust partnerships with other key stakeholders in the housing industry, leading to strong, research, advocacy-based agreements with MBAN (Mortgage Banking Association of Nigeria), REDAN (Real Estate developers of Nigeria), FGSHLB (Federal Government Staff housing Loans Board) in addition to several transaction-driven agreements with major developers geared at growing affordable housing supply around the country.

Arguably the gold standard of these market development initiatives is the development of a transformative technology platform powered by NMRC known as the Housing Market System (HMS). The HMS comprises two main modules: a Mortgage Market System (MMS) and a Mortgage and Housing Market Information Portal (MHIP). The MMS is a transformative technology platform that integrates all systems and processes required for transactions by estate brokers, developers, mortgage bankers as well as NMRC, enabling operators speak to each other, enhances operational efficiency, reduces costs, all of which benefits can be passed onto the consumer.

The MHIP is a go-to platform downloadable as an app from Google play and Apple IOS where the consumer can undertake a house search in any the six geographical zones of Nigeria, calculate mortgage payments on a mortgage calculator, kickstart his/her mortgage application process, have this taken up by an estate broker or mortgage banker and processed on the MMS platform.

For these and many other achievements the Board and management of NMRC wish to extend its particular appreciation to Prof Inyangete for these and other achievements, and wishes him well in his future endeavors.

By Marc Philips