Making it even easier to be green: Fannie Mae upgrades multifamily Green Rewards Product

This year alone, Fannie Mae has provided more than $1.2 billion in financing to qualified green multifamily properties. Fannie Mae’s green financing solutions use pricing breaks and higher loan proceeds to give multifamily investors an incentive to make sustainability improvements to their properties and/or to pursue green building project certifications.

Now the Green Rewards product upgrades make it even easier to invest in sustainability improvements in multifamily properties. Last week, Fannie Mae announced it will cover the cost of the required energy and water audit and lenders will now be able to underwrite 75 percent of the owners’ projected cost savings. These improvements will augment the current offer to underwrite 25 percent of projected cost savings for building tenants through the Green Rewards product. Investors can access the benefits of the program for refinance, acquisitions, supplements and second supplemental loan arrangements.

Fannie Mae, a government-sponsored enterprise/publicly traded company, provides mortgage-backed securities to expand the secondary mortgage market. For example, it buys the mortgages that banks provide to individual homeowners and packages them up to make them secure investments for outside investors, in turn allowing those banks the capital they need to extend more mortgages to qualified individuals.

As one of the largest financial institutions in the world, it is an important signal that Fannie Mae continues to innovate and lead the multifamily green financing market through its suite of products, including Green Rewards, Green Building Certification Pricing Break, Green Preservation Plus and C-PACE consent. These loan products are available to properties that will save 20 percent or more on annual energy or water consumption through improvements, in addition to properties that have already achieved certification through a third-party rating system like LEED®, the world’s most widely used green building rating program.

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