Housing subsidy contracts total 30.8 million euros in December

Budapest, January 30 (MTI) – Applicants looking to take advantage of the government’s home purchase subsidy scheme signed contracts worth a record 9.6 billion forints (EUR 30.8m) in December, a state secretary for the prime minister’s cabinet office said on Monday.

Altogether 36,000 applications have been received since the programme’s introduction in 2015, totalling 87 billion forints, Csaba Dömötör told a press conference.

Young people in Hungary are more and more willing to form families and have children, Katalin Novák, the state secretary in charge of youth and family affairs at the human resources ministry, told the same press conference. She said couples’ willingness to have children was at a 20-year high, which she said was partly down to the housing subsidy programme dubbed CSOK.

Around 60 percent of CSOK subsidies, or 51 billion forints, were paid out to families looking to build or purchase new homes. Half of the subsidies were granted to families planning to raise at least three children, she said, adding that a further 5,000 families had received VAT refunds on home construction worth 22 billion forints.

The government has allocated 211 billion forints towards the home purchase subsidy programme for 2017, up by 30 percent from last year, she said.

Source: MTI