Community Finance and its subsidiary the Community Housing Funding Agency (CHFA) are New Zealand’s specialist intermediary for the community and affordable housing sector.
Since its launch in 2019, Community Finance and now CHFA have become the leading lender to the community and affordable housing sector.
By bringing together debt capital markets, impact investors, the government and philanthropists we are able to support community and affordable housing providers nationwide.
Together we’re building stronger communities and investing in our future. We bring market discipline and social purpose together, to invest in our future and our country.
Community Finance is on a mission to help our country solve our affordable housing crisis.
Manager of the Community Housing Funding Agency:
Community Finance is a social enterprise. We were established in 2019 with a primary focus of supporting 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, with greater efficiency.
In 2024, Community Finance launched CHFA as a natural next step, in response to growing demand from community housing sector for our lending services.
Moving to an affordable housing aggregation model was the logical upgrade needed for New Zealand. By pooling the sectors finance requirements, CHFA can offer much larger bond issuances on market standard terms, allowing us to raise more money, to support more homes. With its scale, credit rating and government support, CHFA makes the social bonds it issues more attractive to investors. This helps secure efficient, long-term finance for the community and affordable housing sector.
To learn more about what we do, click here
Stepping up together:
For Community Finance and CHFA, 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.
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 CHFA, 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.
The main organisations we finance are 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 consciously operating on margins much lower than banks, we can optimise the returns available for investors (to encourage more impact investment to support community and affordable housing) and lower the cost of finance for the affordable housing nationwide.
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.
Visit www.chfa.co.nz to learn more about who we lend to, our impact and how wholesale investors can invest.