Masha’Allah Br. Rizwan Jaka of the ADAMS Center and his family were featured on the cover page of the Business section in the Washington Post. It was a really nice article concerning Shariah-Compliant financing and how many of the Islamic Lending companies have avoided the mortgage crisis and have actually seen growth while other lenders are seeing massive declines.
I have pasted an excerpt below along with the link to the rest of the article for anyone else who’s interested:
The mortgage industry may be in meltdown, but at least one class of lender appears to be flourishing: Islamic finance companies that offer Muslim home buyers alternative arrangements such as lease-to-own deals so they can avoid making the sort of interest payments that many believe their religion forbids.
Officials at Guidance Residential, a Reston company that has financed more than 5,000 home purchases since it began in 2002, said the company is having its best year yet, with business up 7 percent in the first quarter of 2008 from the first quarter of 2007.
At University Islamic Financial, which began in Ann Arbor, Mich., and expanded its operations to Maryland, Virginia and five other states last year, officials said the number of home-financing applications quadrupled from last March to this March.
Representatives of the four major Islamic home-finance institutions in the United States said they do not track the reasons customers choose them over conventional mortgage brokers……Continue Reading
