Lebanon’s PCH eyes USD 100 mn to restart subsidized mortgages at rates below Gulf-funded lender

Lebanon’s state housing agency wants back into the mortgage market for the first time since 2019 — and at a rate that would undercut the Gulf-funded lender doing the job in its absence. Public Corporation for Housing (PCH) Director Rony Lahoud and Social Affairs Minister Haneen Sayed have asked for USD 100 mn in the draft 2027 budget to finance housing loans at 3.5%, a PCH official tells L’Orient Today. Finance Minister Yassine Jaber sent the draft to Cabinet on 31 August and flagged the PCH restart among the “new measures” it contains.

Background: PCH stopped taking applications in 2019, when the crisis took out the Banque du Liban credit line that had subsidized its loans through commercial banks for two decades. The lender that filled the gap wasn’t a Lebanese bank — the sector still isn’t writing mortgages — but Banque de l’Habitat (BDH), which reopened applications in June 2024 on a c. USD 163 mn line from the Kuwait-based Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development.

SOUND SMART- The two are routinely confused. PCH is entirely state-run and subsidizes loans written by commercial banks. BDH is a bank in its own right, 80% owned by private banks and insurers and 20% by the state.

Why it matters: The state would be lending 225 bps cheaper than the Gulf-financed incumbent, and carrying the subsidy itself. BDH cut its housing-loan rate to 5.75% from 6% on 1 July and had granted 1,059 loans worth USD 74 mn as of 2 July, it told L'Orient — an average ticket just under USD 70k. At that size, USD 100 mn is roughly 1.4k mortgages in a country where displacement from the war has pushed prices up hard enough that BDH doubled its loan cap to USD 100k last year.

Gulf money is still the main event here. BDH has been negotiating a USD 300 mn, six-year line with the Qatar Fund for Development and a similar facility with the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development, alongside a separate Qatari USD 100 mn facility for war-damaged homes.

What’s next: Cabinet review, then parliament — which passed the 2026 budget at the end of January, just inside the constitutional deadline.