MOBA Housing SCE is a European Cooperative Society (SCE) — a transnational “cooperative of cooperatives” registered in 2020 as the legal entity of the MOBA network (seven full members across five Central and South-Eastern European (CSEE) countries). It exists to solve a financing gap, not to gate on a national legal form, which makes it the cross-border analogue of the national models like swiss-cooperative-financing and norway-cooperative-financing.
The problem (2022 research, 8 CSEE countries)
Existing finance tools are inadequate for emerging rental/cooperative housing:
- loans available to organisations have very short maturity — unsuitable for long-lived housing assets;
- there is otherwise an absence of adequate financial tools, so individual mortgages dominate and nonprofit providers cannot get started.
The mechanism — “catalytic capital investment”
- Patient, long-term capital that bridges the gap left by missing long-term finance: it sits alongside a (mid-term) bank loan and can cover a significant part of the total investment at the start of a development.
- Of limited duration by design — it kickstarts the market so conventional lenders later step in with better loan frameworks.
- Channelled through intermediary organisations (MOBA is becoming one) that aggregate and structure capital, issue it to end beneficiaries (start-up housing providers), and add capacity-building. Best suited to rental-based and limited-equity cooperative structures; aims to be replicable and scalable.
Open question: figures and instrument terms (fund size, ticket size, interest, who provides the catalytic capital) are not stated in the 2024 source. Confirm the live status and terms against moba.coop before quoting numbers to a user.
Related
- swiss-cooperative-financing — national movement-finance model with a comparable subordinated tranche
- norway-cooperative-financing — national model leaning on a movement vehicle to substitute for equity
- public-cooperative-land-policy — the land-side public-cooperative mechanisms that complement this capital-side gap