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Sareb will close the worst year of the crisis “in the red”.

In 2013, the year where according to all economic forecasts Spain should reach the bottom line of its crisis, the bad bank, Sareb, will generate losses for its shareholders, among them the Spanish tax payers, who control 45% of its capital. This is foreseen in the five year business plan presented by the company yesterday in Madrid.

It is not easy to draft a five year strategic plan for a real estate company in Spain, with the uncertainty of the current context. This is why the managers of the bad bank have chosen to draw different scenarios to calculate their possible profitability, recognizing that this year the company could generate losses, taking into account that it has not worked at its full capacity until February, Walter de Luna, its general director, declared in the presentation of the plan to the press.

Nevertheless, he clarified, when the company is liquidated, in 15 years, the annual profit for the public and private shareholders will be between 13% and 14%, a percentage which is in line with the forecast made by Frob last October.

In spite of the recession, the team lead by Belen Romana is planning to accelerate the sale of assets during the first five years of operation and will take advantage of the network of branches of the financial institutions that have transferred assets in order to do so. Sareb´s management considers that the individual customer is one of the potential purchasers of most of the 76.000 empty properties the bad bank has in its balance, either by acquiring or renting them. Right now, the company has around 6300 rented properties in its balance.

Sareb is also negotiating with institutional investors in order to sell packages of land, properties and portfolios of loans in the next few months.

These operations will be closed at “market prices” and the flow of activity will not be uniform all months, Romana explained, clarifying that Sareb´s market share will be of 4%, which will prevent it from determining which will be the property prices in Spain.

Romana also declared that it hopes to have the due diligence ready for the summer, which has been commissioned to a group of companies that will revise the status of its 197.474 assets transferred from nationalized banks and worth 50.449 million Euros.

Source: El Mundo