Supercharging
community housing
in New Zealand.
A new era begins.
The Community Housing Funding Agency (CHFA) brings together philanthropists, fund managers, Government funding and leading charities to help tackle New Zealand’s estimated $14 billion social housing deficit.
The CHFA aggregates the finance requirements of leading CHPs around the country to efficiently raise the money they require.
The CHFA is designed to unlock efficient finance at scale to support New Zealand’s leading Community Housing Providers (CHPs).
The CHFA is based on proven models used successfully overseas, and in New Zealand by the Local Government Funding Agency (LGFA), to efficiently finance CHPs and support social investment at scale.
The CHFA was launched in November 2024. Lending commenced to leading CHPs in December 2024. The anchor bond issuance is anticipated to be in mid to late 2025. Our website will also be updated mid to late 2025 with further details for investors and CHPs.
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Key parties
The Manager
The Trustee
Launched and managed by Community Finance, the CHFA expands on the work done locally by Community Finance to provide lower cost finance to CHPs to build warm, dry, and affordable homes.
Public Trust will be the Trustee of the CHFA. Public Trust has operated for more than 150 years and is New Zealand’s sole Crown Entity Trustee organisation.
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Community Finance already works with:
Central to the CHFA are a group of philanthropic and socially-minded impact investors committed to supporting New Zealand.
The bonds the CHFA will issue will be available to wholesale debt capital markets and socially-minded investors in New Zealand. This will include leading KiwiSaver providers and Fund Managers.
How it works
Finance is critical for CHPs to deliver social housing at scale. It’s the main component of each new home and the largest ongoing expense.
The CHFA aggregates CHPs’ finance needs and issues bonds to efficiently raise money from wholesale debt capital markets.
By pooling CHPs’ finance requirements, the CHFA can offer much larger bond issuances on market standard terms. This makes the bonds more attractive to investors and helps secure efficient, long-term finance for leading CHPs.
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Unlocking community housing at scale
More about Community Finance
Community Finance is a social enterprise wholly owned by Positive Capital. Community Finance was established in 2019 to help support New Zealand’s charitable CHPs with access to finance at scale and at lower cost. This can help these charities on the front line of the affordable housing crisis scale up and deliver desperately needed new social housing.
We aim to provide the connection between wholesale investors and positive impact investments. Our primary focus is on financing leading CHPs that provide affordable homes around the country with long-term Government funding.
We aspire to support social impact and, as a social enterprise, Community Finance consciously operates on a lower margin than other mainstream lenders and banks.
By operating on a lower margin, we help make the cost of finance lower for CHPs. This is part of our commitment to support New Zealand.
Community Finance was proud to launch the CHFA in November 2024.
For its work in innovating, supporting and delivering efficient finance for CHPs in New Zealand, Community Finance was awarded:
The inaugural Best Impact Investment Fund 2021 by Mindful Money
The Transforming New Zealand Supreme Award and Outstanding Collaboration Award in 2021 at the Sustainable Business Network awards
The inaugural Innovation in Financial Services Award from INFINZ in 2022
We are a social enterprise with a social mission.
What is a social enterprise?
A social enterprise is a purpose-focused organisation which has a social and/or environmental mission, rather than a more traditional business purpose purely focused on profit.
For Community Finance and Positive Capital, we have a social mission particularly focused on supporting the delivery of affordable housing at scale.
We are a social enterprise with a social mission.
Support leading charities that are Community Housing Providers in New Zealand.
We finance leading charities that are CHPs. These charities are on the front line of supporting vulnerable households through social housing. By lowering the cost of finance for these charities, we are improving their capacity to help more people and reinvest surpluses to this important purpose.
Operate on lower margins.
This is a key feature of our purpose. By operating on margins much lower than banks, we can optimise the returns available for investors (to encourage more impact investment to support CHPs) and lower the cost of finance for the charities on the front line.
Advocate and educate.
We invest both time and resources to support charities, raise awareness around impact investing in New Zealand and advocate for greater support and funding for the CHP sector with philanthropists, impact investors and the Government. We believe this can and will over time increase awareness and levels of support available to charities in this space.
Stepping up together
For Community Finance and Positive Capital, one of the key benefits of operating as a social enterprise is that it has enabled us to raise capital to support community housing from a wider range of philanthropists, socially-minded investors and charities. It was only through this capital that we were able to launch and provide our services.
Our shareholder mix includes both registered charities, including the Tindall Foundation and Hoku Foundation, and socially-minded investors, including Anna Stuck, Impact Investments Limited, Lindsay Investment Trust, K1W1 and Edgar family interests.
The need
There are more than 21,000 households currently on the Housing Register which highlights the significant social inequality challenge New Zealand faces.
The negative socio-economic outcomes of failing to address social housing need is well documented with impacts on health, education, crime and productivity.
The CHFA offers a solution. With an estimated $300 billion of funds under management in New Zealand, one of the aspirations and benefits of the CHFA is that it creates a tangible way to scale KiwiSaver and fund manager investment into an area of real social need in our country.
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21,294
as of October 2024
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