PNB Housing sees growth emerging & affordable spaces: MD Girish Kousgi

Mumbai: Carlyle-backed PNB Housing Finance aims to close FY27 with an affordable category loan book of ₹15,000 crore, the mortgage lender’s chief executive told ET, underscoring the role these high-yield exposures would play in driving growth. The category now accounts for ₹2,500 crore of assets.

The lender, predominantly focused earlier on the super prime and prime category of loans, is now concentrating on emerging and affordable housing categories. The average ticket size in the emerging category is ₹25 lakh, and ₹15 lakh in the affordable category.

“A year ago, we completely vacated the super-prime category and now are focused on their prime, emerging and affordable categories,” managing director Girish Kousgi told ET. “The idea is to move toward affordable and emerging because these two are high-yielding segments. We have exited super-prime and reduced prime because margins are lower in that segment. For the retail segment, we expect to grow around 17%.”

The mortgage lender has an affordable housing book of ₹2,500 crore which it has built in the last two years. Kousgi said the company plans to take it to ₹5,000 crore by the end of this fiscal year. It has a yield of 12.6% on its affordable book which is expected to cross 13% next year.

At the end of June 30, 2024, the lender had a total loan book of ₹65,170 crore. Kousgi said he expects the overall book to grow by around 18% over the next three years.The lender which had vacated the construction financing space is planning to once again restart its lending in that space. Currently, the corporate loan book is ₹1,800 crore and its gross non-performing loans are nil.”We will be restarting the corporate book in the next few months,” Kousgi said. “Corporate will always be less than 10% of the overall portfolio. We would primarily focus on top-notch developers in select cities.”At present the retail segment contributes 97.5% of the overall book while corporate contributes only 2.5%.

While the lender currently has 303 branches it plans to add 50 branches every year. Most of these branches will be in the affordable and emerging category. At present, 160 of its branches are primarily focused on the affordable category.

At the end of June, promoter Punjab National Bank held 28.13% while Carlyle through Quality Investment Holdings Pcc held 32.68% in the mortgage lender. In July, Carlyle Group sold a 12.8% stake in the mortgage lender for a total consideration of ₹2,642 crore.