Tag: fragmented market

Habitat will Invest €500M in Land Purchases by 2021

23 October 2018 – Expansión

Habitat, the property developer controlled by the investment fund Bain Capital, is planning to invest €500 million in land purchases between now and 2021.

The company, which has unveiled its business plan for the next few years, expects to hand over 2,000 homes per year from 2021 onwards. Currently, Habitat owns 800,000 m2 of land for the construction of 9,000 homes.

“Bain has provided sufficient capital to finance the purchase of land with own funds. There is no debt except for property developer loans”, explained Juan María Nin (pictured above), President of the real estate company.

To date, the firm has invested €70 million in the purchase of land and it is planning to invest an additional €50 million over the coming months with the aim of continuing its growth.

Brad Palmer, Managing Director and Head of Bain in Europe, said that following the entry of the fund, the company is “healthy and ready to grow”.

Palmer indicated that, for the time being, the fund is not thinking about an IPO, but rather is focusing on the purchase of land, constituting a good professional team and offering a high-quality product for its clients.

Similarly, he indicated that, in a market as fragmented as Spain, consolidation between real estate companies is possible, although it is too early to say what role Habitat will play in that process.

The CEO of Habitat, José Carlos Saz, indicated that although most of the portfolio is buildable land, the property developer is also opening the door to buying land under management.

Saz also said that the property developer plans to close the year with revenues of almost €100 million and a positive gross operating profit (EBITDA).

Original story: Expansión (by Rebeca Arroyo)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Spain’s Property Development Sector Will Continue its Expansive Cycle for the Next 3 Years

30 May 2018 – Eje Empresas

The CEO of Neinor Homes, Juan Velayos, has highlighted that the “healthy and strong bullish cycle” that the property development market is experiencing at the moment, will result in a “positive” performance over the next three years, before reaching “a situation of stability lasting many years”.

The main challenge (facing the market) is to “become more predictable”, in aspects such as the time it takes to obtain licences, a problem that may be resolved because “the market is going to continue helping”, according to Velayos.

The Director of Strategy and Investment at Aedas Homes, Sergio Gálvez, explained that the situation in the property development sector is “unique” given that it is recovering from “a very low level”.

The Executive President of Inmobiliaria del Sur, Ricardo Pumar, agrees that “the macroeconomic forecasts point to a very good situation for the next three years”.

Pumar stressed that the recovery is “widespread” but he has opted to facilitate access to housing for young people to “boost the whole sector”.

The President of Quabit Inmobiliaria, Félix Abánades, predicts that the expansion cycle “will last for six years” and he agreed that there will be “significant increases in prices” over the next three to four years.

The market for property developers is clearly expanding and growing with a very “solid” demand, he added.

Investors back the property development sector

The Partner at the consultancy firm Deloitte, Alberto Valls, highlighted that “investor appetite continues” but is still a long way off the levels seen before the economic crisis.

“There are barriers to entry, such as capital, the lack of available land to build on and the limited production capacity”, he said.

He said that half of the property development market is concentrated in Madrid, Barcelona, Alicante, Málaga and Valencia.

The Spanish sector is more fragmented than those of other European countries, given that the top five property developers account for just 6% of the market, whereas in the UK and France, they represent around 40%.

Nevertheless, Valls pointed out that “the trend is towards corporate concentration and the stock market debut of new players”.

Original story: Eje Empresas

Translation: Carmel Drake

Ministry Of Development: Urban Land Prices Rose By 6.6% In Q2

16 September 2016 – Expansión

The market for urban land is starting to show signs of recovery. The price of plots of land rose by 6.6% during the second quarter of the year, to amount to €163.4/sqm. It is the best figure since Q4 2012, although it is still light years away from the peak recorded in 2007, at the height of the real estate boom, when prices reached €285/sqm.

One of the main conclusions coming out of the statistics published yesterday by the Ministry of Development is that, thanks to the real estate pull in the capital and Barcelona, the Community of Madrid and Cataluña account for almost half of the market for urban land. Specifically, they accounted for a total sales volume of €351.9 million, i.e. 47% of the total volume for Spain (€751.1 million). This most recent figure is 21.7% higher than a year ago. The total surface area sold in Spain amounted to 5.6 million sqm, up by 7.7%.

The total value of land sold soared by 85% in Barcelona and by 11% in Madrid.

The number of transactions grew by 16% YoY across Spain. In April, May and June, 4,435 plots of land were sold, compared to 3,819 during Q2 2015. The most significant increase was recorded in municipalities with more than 50,000 inhabitants, where sales rose by 20%. In towns with between 10,000 and 50,000 inhabitants, there were 1,580 transactions, up by 24.6%.

In municipalities with more than 50,000 inhabitants, the highest average prices were reported in the provinces of Barcelona (€485/sqm, equivalent to triple the average for Spain), Madrid (€456/sqm) and the Balearic Islands (€373/sqm). The lowest prices were recorded in Guadalajara (€72.6/sqm, less than half the national average), Cádiz (€100/sqm) and Tarragona (€101.4/sqm).

Prices rose by just 0.1% in the cities, given that Madrid pushed down the statistics with a decrease of 14%. According to the real estate consultant, José Luis Ruiz Bartolomé, that is a result of the comparison with data from 2015, when “there was very little urban land available in Madrid, and investors sought refuge in plots of land in the most solvent areas, whilst this year land sales have spread across the whole city and are no longer limited to just the central areas”.

In Barcelona, the increase in land prices amounted to 3.5% during Q2 2016.

The Ministry of Development also published statistics yesterday about the appraisal value of unsubsidised homes, which rose by 2% YoY to €1,506.4/sqm in Q2 2016.

After 26 quarters of YoY decreases in house prices, which began at the end of 2008, “this data represents the fifth consecutive quarter of nominal price increases”, said the Ministry. In real terms, in other words, accounting for the effect of inflation, the increase amounted to 2.9%.

Ten autonomous regions reported YoY increases, led by the Balearic Islands (+5.9%), Madrid (+4.8%), Cataluña (+4.6%), the Canary Islands (+2.9%), Extremadura (+2.4%), Ceuta and Melilla (+2.3%) and Galicia (+1.4%). By contrast, the other regions reported YoY decreases – in appraisal prices, not in sales prices – led by Navarra (with a decrease of -2.2%), Aragón (-1.9%), País Vasco (-1.7%) and Cantabria (-1.3%).

House values are now 28.3% lower than their maximum levels, reached during Q1 2008. (…).

Original story: Expansión (by Juanma Lamet)

Translation Carmel Drake

Investment Funds & Socimis Revolutionise RE Sector

26 October 2015 – Expansión

The real estate sector is recovering well. During the first nine months of 2015, purchases of offices, commercial and logistics assets, hotels and residential properties amounted to €10,800 million, representing an increase of 57% compared with the same period last year. After more than five years of severe economic difficulties, the return of investment, at the hands of investment funds and Socimis has breathed a new wave of optimism into the sector.

“After a really tough economic crisis, we were almost in a coma and the arrival of these funds is invigorating the market”, said Juan Antonio Gómez-Pintado, President of the Association for Real Estate Developers in Madrid (‘Asociación de Promotores Inmobiliarios de Madrid’ or Asprima), who together with Rafael González-Cobos, President of Grupo Inmobiliario Ferrocarril and Gecopi; Alberto Fernández-Aller, Corporate Director of Prinex Real Estate; and Manuel del Pozo, Assistant Director of Expansión, were responsible for opening the forum ‘The New Era of the Real Estate Sector in Spain: Investment funds and Socimis’.

The event, organised by the newspaper Expansión, in collaboration with Drago Capital, Gómez-Acebo & Pombo, JLL, Neinor Homes and Merlin Properties, and with Prinex as the technological partner, served to highlight the evolution of the market in recent years and the impact the Socimis have had on the strong investment figures recorded in the sector.

46% of the capital invested in Spain so far this year has come from Socimis, an investment vehicle inspired by the REITs in the USA, first launched in the 1960s, which did not arrive in Spain until 2009. As the Corporate Director of Prinex Real Estate explained, they are “a mechanism that allow us to hold much more open asset portfolios, without any major legal or regulatory obligations and with great tax advantages”.

Partnerships

Moreover, the entry of international capital is also helping to professionalise the sector, as well as to support the recovery of Spanish property developers and real estate companies, hit hard by years of paralysis and lack of investment. “All of the funds coming into Spain are looking for support from companies that already know the environment. They are using their capital to undertake operations with Spanish developers”, said Fernández-Aller. “They generate capital movement, investment and jobs. The Socimis are helping to create a professionalised stock of homes for rent”, added the President of Grupo Inmobiliario Ferrocarril. (…).

Meanwhile, the participants highlighted the threat that political instability poses to the recovery of the real estate sector. One example, they indicated, is Madrid, where all of the major urban planning operations (Canalejas, Chamartín and Edificio España) are currently on hold.

Large cities

The recovery of the real estate market is happening in a very uneven way and, for the time being, is limited to the major cities only, such as Madrid and Barcelona, and some coastal regions. (…).

Meanwhile, Juan Velayos, CEO of Neinor Homes, emphasised the profound transformation that the Spanish real estate market has experienced over the last 18 months and said that he was convinced that the mistakes that led this sector – which accounted for 25% of the country’s GDP at its height – to the brink of disaster, will not be repeated.

“What we are seeing in Spain is an absolute transformation of the industry. I do not think that the banks will let what happened before with the RE bubble happen again. We are not going to see any projects without equity. It is going to be a sector that, for the first time, builds what customers actually want. If we do not understand that (basic premise), then customers are not going to buy homes from us”, concluded Velayos.

Original story: Expansión (by Javier G. Fernández)

Translation: Carmel Drake