STATE-ADMINISTERED Home Development Mutual Fund, also known as Pag-IBIG Fund, has delayed its P12-billion bond offering, originally scheduled for launching in October, as it seeks to change the features of the deal.

“We’re now targeting December or January next year for the launch,” president and chief executive officer Jaime Fabiaña said on Thursday.

Pag-IBIG has decided to drop the initial plan to offer the bonds in two tranches and instead raise the whole amount in a single transaction, he said in a phone interview.

The initial plan was to launch the first tranche of P7 billion, which would be swapped for Pag-IBIG bonds maturing May 2010, and offer a second tranche worth P5 billion to augment funds for lending.

Fabiaña said the debt-swap feature of the deal was no longer being considered. He did not elaborate.

“We will have to go back to the Department of Finance to seek approval for these changes,” he said.

But the proceeds of the bond offer will still be used for maturing obligations and other financing requirements, he said.

Pag-IBIG will also seek the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas’ approval for other proposed features to make the bonds more attractive to investors, particularly banks.

Under the proposal, investing in Pag-IBIG bonds will be made an alternative mode of compliance with laws requiring banks to allocate a portion of their loan portfolio for the agriculture and agrarian-reform sectors and socialized housing.

The proposed bonds will have a tenor of five or seven years.

Members and nonmembers of Pag-IBIG, foreign investors, corporations, developers and insurance companies may invest in the proposed bonds.

Fabiaña, meanwhile, clarified that Pag-IBIG has not yet appointed any arrangers for the bond offer. But he said the fund had “initial talks” with state-owned Development Bank of the Philippines.

First Metro Investment Corp., the investment-banking arm of the Metrobank Group, was reported previously by another newspaper as one of the two arrangers for the deal.

The housing provident fund has allocated P84.5 billion for lending this year, 20-percent higher than last year’s total of P71 billion.

Of the programmed amount for lending, up to P43 billion are available to “end-users” or members, and P7.5 billion to housing developers. Members can also avail themselves of “multipurpose loans” for which the fund has a budget of P34 billion.

The fund’s housing-loan portfolio was as big as P156 billion as of end-March, or about two-thirds of its total assets of P233 billion.