Private-sector lender IndusInd Bank is looking at partnering with real estate developers and companies to ramp up its home loan portfolio, managing director and chief executive officer (MD & CEO) Sumant Kathpalia told Moneycontrol after announcing the bank's Q1FY24 results in Mumbai on July 18.

“We are looking at partnering with builders and real estate companies and are already in talks with them,” he said.

To begin with, the bank plans to expand its home loan book. Currently, the bank has a home loan book of Rs 675 crore, and it plans to expand the portfolio to Rs 15,000 crore in the next three years, Kathpalia said.

Top mortgage lenders

According to the latest Reserve Bank of India (RBI) data on sectoral deployment, the total lending to the housing sector till May 2023 stands at Rs 19.56 lakh crore, growing by 14.6 percent on a year-on-year (YoY) basis from Rs 17.07 lakh crore in May 2022.

HDFC Bank ranks on the top, with the largest home loan book of around Rs 7.3 lakh crore. The country’s largest private sector bank has the biggest home loan after its merger with parent company HDFC Ltd.

State Bank of India (SBI), which currently has a home loan book of Rs 6.4 lakh crore, comes next. The other top players in this segment include ICICI Bank (Rs 3.46 lakh crore) as of March, Axis Bank (Rs 1.57 lakh crore) and Punjab National Bank (Rs 81,863 crore).

According to a report by SBI in August 2022, India’s home loan market is set to double by 2027.

“Post COVID-19, working from home has emerged as a dominant trend that is redefining the mortgage loan demand for the household sector,” SBI said.

Kathpalia said that the bank is currently in the early stages of home loan growth and is looking at market conditions.

“We are at a pilot stage and our home loan book is currently at Rs 650 crore to Rs 675 crore. We will observe for the next three-six months how the delinquencies and floor rates behave,” Kathpalia said.

Meanwhile, IndusInd Bank, on July 18, reported a net profit of Rs 2,124 crore for the April-June quarter of FY24, which marks a 33 percent jump as compared to Rs 1,631 crore clocked in the year-ago period.

The lender’s net interest income (NII) stands at Rs 5,863 crore, which increased by 18 percent as compared to Rs 4,125 crore in the corresponding quarter of the previous fiscal.

The bank's gross non-performing asset (GNPA) stood at 1.94 percent, down from 2.35 percent in the same quarter last year. On the other hand, net NPA for the quarter stood at 0.58 percent, improving from 0.67 percent on a year-on-year basis.