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The Brazilian Association of eal Estate Credit and Savings (Associação Brasileira de Crédito Imobiliário e Poupança, ABECIP) recently published lending statistics for 2011 as well as its expectations for 2012.

President Dilma Rousseff has sanctioned a Law – Cadastro Positivo (‘Positive Credit’) – which gives banks and other financial institutions the authority to offer low interest rate payments to consumers who prove themselves to be good at meeting their commitments.

As a result of the facts and figures pointed out in our post ‘Brazil’s Real Estate Price Rises are Highest in the World’, perhaps unsurprisingly the discussion of a potential bubble that is about to burst has remained throughout the country – with the general public consensus continuing to maintain that housing values are out of touch with reality.

The Bank of Brazil (Banco do Brasil) has stated its intention to expand in being a mortgage provider for the country´s low income housing programme – the Minha Casa, Minha Vida (My House, My Life). Announced by planning Minister Miriam Belchior, the bank´s priority is to focus on being the prominent ´financial operator for families earning up to three times the minimum wage.´

Data released by Secovi-SP (the São Paulo Housing Syndicate) saw a drop of 61.8 percent of new home sales in Brazil’s economic hub when comparing March 2011 with the same period of 2010. A total of 1,566 units were sold – compared to 3,959 in March 2010 – also representing a reduction of 16.2 percent from February 2011.

Caixa Econômica Federal – the Brazilian bank with over an 70 percent share of the national mortgage market – looks set to commence a stricter approach to the granting of finance. One of the main emerging issues has been the growth of housing of bad quality and sub-standard technical adherence – to which the institution has been using as mortgage security. The concern is that such housing will remain in bad quality and, particularly when constructed in scale, could turn to form collectives of favela communities.

Fabio Nogueira of Quartzo – one of Brazil’s growing residential real estate construction companies (based in Minas Gerais) – stated in an interview with the Pini Web Construction magazine that he expects that competition between the larger and the small to medium players will intensify as the sector continues to grow in the next few years.

A short blog post on the new proposals being proposed to further limit foreign ownership of Brazilian land to a maximum of 3,000 hectares – in an attempt to control the ever growing number of large scale land purchases in rural regions of the country.

The March 2011 statistics and graphs with information related to Brazil’s real estate and land industry by clicking on the link above – including the OECD composite leading indicators, inflation statistics, the SELIC interest rate, housing / private / commercial sector lending, percentage changes in construction costs, consumer spending levels, consumer / industrial / business confidence, real earnings and unemployment.

A recorded interview we undertook with Bruno Saraiva, a Brazilian economist and sociologist at the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB).  We discussed a range of issues related to his work in Brazil including short / medium / long term growth prospects; Brazil’s positioning on the global stage; the relationship with other economies both developed and developing; impending challenges;  housing policy; dealing with the issue favelas; the new government’s understanding of the needs of poorer sections of society; other infrastructural projects being undertaken by the IADB and the country’s relatively low positioning on the 2011 Index of Economic Freedom amongst other subjects.