Housing finance continues to have very significant relevance to the micro and macroeconomic health of the country. A well-functioning housing finance system offers incentives for households to save, provides investors with opportunities to gain stable, long term returns, creates large numbers of jobs for skilled and unskilled workers in construction and ancillary industries, enables homeowners to leverage their physical assets into financial assets for investment, and contributes greatly to the deepening and broadening of the financial sector.

Housing market activity is thus an important leading indicator of overall macroeconomic activity and has a tremendous impact, both in terms of providing social stability and in promoting economic development. Resultantly, ensuring the availability of housing and the growth of housing finance markets must be a policy priority in Pakistan.

Supply of affordable housing has major impact in terms of improving living conditions, health, education and human development. In order to create an enabling environment for an efficient housing sector to boost up the mortgage finance industry, there is a need of urgent attention of all key stakeholders. The country’s population is booming and the ever-increasing mass of humanity is moving to the cities like never before. At present about 38 percent of the population of more than 170 million resides in urban areas and this proportion is only rising further each year.  The pace of urbanization is leaving existing social infrastructure in the lurch. Studies attest that over 45 percent of the total urban population dwells in slums or irregular settlements which speak volume of the deplorable state of housing finance in the country.