The Official Credit Institute (ICO), founded in 1971, will have a permanent presence in the Canary Islands, as announced this Wednesday by its president, Manuel Illueca, in a conference where he presented its financing lines for building social housing for rent.
The objective of the ICO's new strategy is to contribute to "de-stressing a market that has very high prices and that demands an immediate solution", so this institution also offers support mechanisms to developers, not only in the field of rental, but in that of home ownership.
Illueca, who has starred in these conferences at the invitation of the Canarian president, Fernando Clavijo, has estimated that, given the problem of the lack of housing, "we must act on several fronts" because "we must address the problem of demand, since there are many young people who need to have a home of their own and need a guarantee because many do not have the possibility of saving the 20% that the bank asks them for".
For this group, the ICO offers guarantees "that are working very well" with which it has attended to more than 1,700 financing requests, "an important way to de-stress the rental market and redirect it towards the home ownership market".
In addition to that, he said, the affordable rental market "requires immediate solutions because we have a park that is 1.5%, a negligible percentage compared to the countries around us".
To get to the level of those countries "would require producing more than one million homes and, therefore, that should be an effort that we make", for which the ICO offers "a very attractive financing product, with very long terms" and an allocation from the Recovery Plan with which more than 6,000 homes have been financed since March.
Since its creation and until that month of 2024, the ICO had financed 20,000 homes, to which these 6,000 have been added.
"We are very willing to finance, we have 4,000 million" for this, Illueca asserted, who assured that his presence on the islands reinforces the ICO's commitment to the Canary Islands.
Regarding the financing, with its own funds, that the ICO offers to developers, he explained that a new financial instrument that is in the adjudication phase and for which there is a lot of demand would allow to make available to this business sector 50% of the budget they need to build new housing, a mechanism with which this institution aspires to finance 10,000 new properties.
With all these instruments, the ICO aspires to help finance 31,000 new homes in Spain, he said.
Within the framework of the PERTE of industrialized construction recently announced by the president, Pedro Sánchez, the ICO develops "a battery of measures linked to this issue, which is not minor, but essential, because it allows shortening response times".
For this reason, he said, "it will be done with broad vision, acting from the supply side, facilitating if necessary long-term debt financing, and from the demand side, from the developer who demands industrialized financing".
The president of the ICO stressed that the lack of housing or the difficulties in accessing it affects the country's productivity, per capita income and the future of young people.