The president of the Employers’ Confederation of the Mexican Republic (Coparmex), José Medina Mora, considered giving powers to Infonavit to build homes as a regression.
“This initiative (to reform article 123 of the Constitution) proposes giving powers to this institute so that it can build housing, and here we agree with the workers’ sector that it would be a regression. We remember very well the times when Infonavit coordinated this construction,” he said this Friday during the 132nd Extraordinary General Assembly of the institute.
“If we review the explanatory memorandum from 1992, before that reform, it is very clear in the cost analysis, which shows that when Infonavit took over banking functions, the cost of housing was reduced by 30%,” he added.
Last week, the Sectoral Directorate of the Infonavit Workers expressed their opposition to the institute building housing and called for it to continue financing it.
Read: An Infonavit builder does not solve the low housing affordability: BBVA México
The reform proposal, included in the reform package announced in February by then-president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, will be discussed on October 22 in the Chamber of Deputies, according to Morena’s vice coordinator, Alfonso Ramírez Cuéllar.
“Returning to that model puts us in a dilemma. We can take advantage of the capabilities of our tripartism, such as the competitiveness of the specialized sector and supply, through government efforts regarding licenses, permits, infrastructure, land served, and direct subsidies to the worker,” said Medina Mora.
He proposed visualizing an Infonavit where beneficiaries find solutions to their housing needs, and financial options allow access to sufficient credit to buy a house and pay for it in a reasonable time.
Read: Infonavit will create a construction company to reduce expenses in its housing plan
“An institute that allows homes to have the best public infrastructure for transportation, education and health, and where workers’ resources have positive real returns so that they increase their savings,” he explained.
He said that employers contribute to the National Housing Fund through more than 1,100,000 companies, and that in 2023 the fund amounted to more than 180,000 million pesos.
He highlighted that the availability of resources from the Fund to Support the Housing Needs of Workers exceeds 750,000 million pesos, and that Infonavit is the financial institution that grants the most mortgage and remodeling loans in the country.
‘Credit granting has stagnated’
However, he declared that Infonavit faces great challenges, as he stated that the dynamics of granting loans has stagnated in recent years.
“Since 2019, there has been less placement of credits in low-income salary segments. Let us remember that the subsidy that existed so that low-income workers had access to housing was removed,” he stated.
He contrasted the delinquency rate of overdue portfolio, “19% of overdue portfolio on the balance sheet and 12% off the balance sheet, that is, 1,402 thousand loans that are not paid,” with the 5% rate of other mortgage companies.
He declared that there has also been a poor performance of the housing subaccounts, a low capacity in serving beneficiaries and borrowers, failures in the operational management of the institute, vulnerability in information security and obsolescence of technological systems and applications.
He added that there are unaddressed observations from supervisory entities such as internal audit, external audit and the National Banking and Securities Commission.
“We cannot and should not continue with this operational inertia because it only leads to the deterioration of financial and management indicators and worse still, to not fulfilling our social function of providing adequate housing to workers,” he said.
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