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ABSTRACT AND KEY WORDS

Abstract

There has been tremendous growth in the demand for housing.

Consequently, the requirements of housing finance increased considerably.

Now, housing loan segment has become more competitive due to the entry of

new institutions into the industry. Because of intense competition, the players

in the sector have to become more customer oriented. They must provide

quality services to their customers and ensure that customers are satisfied

with their experience. Hence, the study on housing finance services assumes

great significance.

The study was mainly intended to assess and analyse the level of

awareness, perception and satisfaction of borrowers as to the housing finance

services of HDFC and LICHFL, the former representing the private sector and

the latter the proxy of public sector housing finance institution. The 630 home

loan beneficiaries (HDFC-360 and LICHFL-270) from the three zones in the

state of Kerala compose the sample of the study. Then, two districts, having

the highest growth rate in terms of per capita income from each zone, were

selected and from each district, 60 customers of HDFC and 45 customers of

LICHFL were selected by observing simple random sampling technique

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The results of the analysis reveals that the two selected HFIs

differentiate themselves in framing policies and taking efforts to influence the

level of both awareness and perception of their borrowers on many aspects of

their products. When LICHFL pursued a more customer centred policy by

keeping greater information efficiency, its rival HDFC placed greater thrust on

earning factor by focusing its operating efficiency especially on sanctioning

and disbursement of loan with in limited time.

In terms of the level of satisfaction of borrowers with the loan products

rendered by their HFIs, the position of LICHFL in the mind of its borrowers is

much higher than that occupied by its rival in their customer’s mind. Such

difference in satisfaction level happened mainly due to the difference in the

gap between the borrower expectations and performance perceived by them.

However, borrower attributes did not contribute much to such difference.

The main limitation of the study is that it deals with the most qualitative

aspect of human behaviour, ‘satisfaction’, which cannot be exactly quantified.

Key words

Housing finance, Housing stock, Housing loan products, Housing

finance institutions, Borrower awareness, Borrower perception, Borrower

satisfaction, Borrower attributes, Residential mortgage backed securitisation,

Reverse mortgage loan, On-line approval, Non performing assets.