How and Where to Request Rental Loans until 30 September

Loans to pay the rent may be requested retroactively from 1 April and will be granted up to €900 per month, provided that the borrower is in an economically vulnerable situation.

Loans to pay the rent may be requested retroactively from 1 April and will be granted up to €900 per month, provided that the borrower is in an economically vulnerable situation.

How and where to request loans

With the coronavirus crisis, many tenants have seen their ability to pay the rent compromised. The Order issued by the Ministry of Transport published in the BOE on 1 May, establishes the characteristics of the €1.2 billion line of interest-free loans backed by the State, which have been enabled to help tenants, and the requirements that they must fulfil to obtain them.

Property Developers Ask for Public Guarantees and for VAT on New Home Purchases to be Reduced

APCEspaña is proposing a series of measures to improve access to housing and increase sales, such as the approval of guarantees and lines of credit to subsidise loans.

The Association of Property Developers of Spain (APCEspaña) has asked the Government to put in place measures to alleviate the effect of the coronavirus on the housing market, including credits guaranteed by the State and the reduction of taxes for the purchase of first homes.

One of the priority measures to improve access to housing for young people and increase sales is the approval of guarantees and lines of credit for first home loans that stimulate purchases. This has been introduced successfully in other European countries, such as the United Kingdom. “This measure does not entail a cost for the State, as it is not classified as debt,” says the association.

The Government Sets Aside €1.2 Billion for Tenants who Cannot Afford to Pay the Rent

The aid plan for tenants designed by the Ministry for Transport, Mobility and the Urban Agenda will support 450,000 tenants with €1.2 billion.

The Government will enable a line of credits up to a maximum of €1.2 billion, guaranteed by the State, for those tenants who cannot afford to pay the rent on their homes due to economic difficulties resulting from the current health crisis and State of Emergency, according to reports by Europa Press.

That is the spending increase that the Council of Ministers approved for the Ministry of Transport, Mobility and the Urban Agenda on 14 April. That Department will guarantee loans through the ICO in a scheme that is estimated may benefit around 450,000 tenants.

Merlin Properties Extends €129-Million Loan to San José

6 November 2019 – Merlin Properties has extended a €129.10 million loan to the San José construction group, part of a recent transaction which saw the Spanish socimi acquire a 14.4% stake in Operation Chamartín. The socimi agreed to pay €168 million as well as grant the loan to San José.

The loan is structured into two tranches, the first, worth 86.39 million euros, has a 20-year maturity and an interest rate of 2%.

The second, €42.72-million tranche, also pays 2%. Merlin structured the loan as a cash deposit to guarantee working capital financing that San José has until October 31. The second tranche will mature on December 2.

Original Story: Expansión

Adaptation/Translation: Richard D. K. Turner

CaixaBank Creates a Subsidiary to Finance Loans to Property Developers

17 June 2019 – Eje Prime

CaixaBank has created a new subsidiary to finance loans to property developers. The entity will operate under the brand CaixaBank Real Estate&Homes and will seek stable agreements with established property developers such as Neinor, Aedas Homes and Vía Célere, amongst others.

In 2018, CaixaBank financed 581 real estate projects lending €2.6 billion in total, up by 13% YoY. Moreover, 84% of the developments financed by the bank last year corresponded to projects involving less than 50 homes.

Original story: Eje Prime

Translation/Summary: Carmel Drake

Spain’s New Mortgage Act will Enter Into Force on 17 June

18 March 2019 – Expansión

The new Mortgage Act was published in the BOE on Saturday and it will enter into force in three months time, on 17 June 2019.

The legislation reflects an EU directive, which seeks to increase the transparency of mortgage contracts to try to reduce the high rates of litigation in the banking system.

It means that Spanish legislation will, for the first time, require the banks to bear all of the costs associated with the formalisation of a mortgage, except for those relating to the appraisal/survey.

The Bank of Spain agrees that the new law should reduce the number of litigation cases but voiced concerns that it will also make new loans more expensive.

Original story: Expansión

Translation/Summary: Carmel Drake

CaixaBank Granted Loans Amounting to €2.2bn to Hotels in 2018

19 February 2019 – Expansión

CaixaBank Hotels & Tourism granted loans amounting to €2.186 billion to the Spanish hotel sector in 2018, a figure that represents an increase of 46% with respect to the previous year. Moreover, 2,800 operations were carried out, up by 8% compared to 2017. The Balearic Islands and Cataluña are the autonomous regions that received the most loans.

Original story: Expansión

Translation: Carmel Drake

Bankia Signs Property Developer Loans Worth €450M in 2018

2 January 2019 – Eje Prime

Bankia is consolidating its return to the property development sector. The bank signed loans worth €450 million for the construction of homes during 2018, its first year back in the real estate business after the restrictions imposed by the European Commission, as a condition for saving the company from bankruptcy, came to an end.

During the year that just ended, Bankia signed several financing operations with real estate developers to construct 2,200 homes in total in Madrid, Cataluña, the Community of Valencia, Andalucía and the Balearic Islands. With these figures, the bank doubled the expectations that it had set itself when it re-launched in the real estate sector, according to reports from the entity in a statement.

Following the results of the first year, the entity chaired by José Ignacio Goiriogolzarri says that it is carrying out its activity “in accordance with the new standards of prudence in the real estate sector, which includes a requirement for adequate marketing stages and the comprehensive control of the development of projects”.

The €450 million financed in 2018 forms part of Bankia’s strategy to try to re-conquer the property developer sector and achieve a market share of 8% by 2020.

Bankia was rescued in 2012 with public aid and sanctioned by Brussels to refrain from participating in the real estate market for five years as a condition for receiving some of the capital that was used to rescue it from financial crisis.

Original story: Eje Prime

Translation: Carmel Drake

Ghost Towns Still Haunt Spain in Property Rebound a Decade After

25 November 2018 – Bloomberg

Juan Velayos’s biggest headache these days is getting licenses fast enough to hand over new homes such as the upscale condos his company is building in the northern suburbs of Madrid.

Less than 60 miles away, Ricardo Alba’s neighborhood tells a different story about Spain’s property market. The fencing instructor is one of only two occupants at a block of apartments whose development was frozen in its tracks when banks pulled the plug on credit.

“The real estate sector’s recovery in Spain is developing at two clearly different speeds,” said Fernando Rodriguez de Acuna, director of Madrid-based real-estate consultancy R.R. de Acuna & Asociados. “While one part of the country is consolidating the recovery of the sector and even expanding, another part of the country is stagnating and is showing few signs of returning to pre-crisis levels in the medium- and long-term.”

A decade after the financial crisis hit, Spain’s real estate recovery is a tale of two markets. Key cities and tourism hot spots are enjoying a fresh boom, fueled by interest rates that are still near historic lows, an economic recovery and a banking system that’s finally cleaning up its act. Private equity firms such as Blackstone Group LP are picking up once-toxic assets worth tens of billions of dollars and parsing out what’s still of value, often using their playbook from the U.S. real estate recovery to convert properties into rentals.

But travel a little beyond the bustling centers, to the outskirts of smaller villages, and ghost towns still litter the landscape — once ambitious developments, often started on agricultural land that was converted into building lots just before the crisis hit. They still stand half-finished, unable to find a buyer.

The “Bioclimatic City La Encina” where Alba began renting an apartment two months ago is one such development. Situated on the edge of the village of Bernuy de Porreros, about 10 kilometers (6 miles) from Segovia, it promised to be Spain’s first environmentally-friendly town, providing solar energy and recycled water for 267 homes, comprised of two-, three-, and four-bedroom chalets and apartments. A faded billboard speaks of the dreams that were sold, including communal swimming pools and gardens for residents who would “live… naturally.”

Today, only about a dozen of the homes are occupied. One street has finished homes but half have their windows bricked up to discourage break-ins, locals said. Alba does have solar panels heating his water, but his electricity comes from the local network. On the far side of the development, trees sprout out of the middle of a street that was never paved. Brightly-colored pipes and cables protrude from the ground. Bags of plaster on a pallet have long hardened.

Spain’s housing crash was fueled by a speculative frenzy combined with loose restrictions and corruption that allowed plots of farmland in rural villages to be converted to feed a demand for homes that never truly existed, said Velayos, who is chief executive officer of Neinor Homes. At the height of the boom in 2006, authorities approved 865,561 new home licenses when even in an economic boom demand is no greater than 250,000 homes, he says.

Banks were handing out loans to developers who had little to lose if a project didn’t find a buyer because the money wasn’t theirs. The result was an almost total collapse of the market and close to $200 billion of soured assets.

About half of them were bought in 2012 by Sareb, a bad bank set up by the government to help lenders. Sareb spent about 50 billion euros to acquire assets that were once valued at twice that amount, mostly loans to developers and real estate. Among the latter are also 97 of the 267 properties at La Encina. None of them are currently for sale as Sareb works through legal issues and construction of many isn’t finished.

Other assets were picked up by deep-pocketed investors such as Blackstone, which has 25 billion euros invested in Spain, according to Claudio Boada, a senior adviser at the firm. The New York-based company — the world’s largest private markets investor — is doing what it did at home after the financial crisis: renting out homes instead of selling them in a bid that fewer people can afford to own. Spain had a relatively high home ownership rate before the crisis but it has since come down.

Blackstone’s Bet

“We’re holding most of what we own and looking to rent it out for the foreseeable future,” said James Seppala, head of real estate for Europe at Blackstone. “There’s a meaningful increase in demand for rental residential around the world, including in Spain, driven by home ownership rates coming down.”

Private equity investors also backed a new breed of real estate developers that are bringing a different rigor to the industry. Companies such as Neinor and Aedas Homes S.A.U. are more tech-savvy when assessing markets, and emphasize industrial production techniques to improve efficiency. They’re behind a surge in licenses for new homes to 12,172 new homes in July, the highest monthly total in a decade.

But demand is uneven: Madrid is enjoying its most robust year of home construction since 2008 with an average of 2,151 licenses awarded per month in the first seven months of the year. In Segovia, just 27 minutes from Madrid on the state-run bullet train, an average of 25 homes licenses have been approved per month in 2018, compared with an average of 180 homes a decade earlier.

The volume of residential mortgages sold in Spain peaked in late 2005 before hitting a low in 2013. Since then they have gradually picked up, with 28,755 sold in August, a seven percent annual increase.

Velayos, chief executive officer at Neinor, said business is starting to pick up beyond Madrid and Barcelona to smaller cities and the coast. His company plans to hand over 4,000 homes by 2021, more than 12 times as many as in 2017. The biggest challenge has been getting licenses approved on time. Velayos had to cut his delivery target for 2019 by a third as often understaffed local councils cause bottlenecks in the production process.

More significantly, Spain’s real estate is now funded by investor’s equity and not credit, said Velayos. Neinor was bought by private equity firm Lonestar Capital Management LLC from Kutxabank SA in 2014 and went public in March 2017. Aedas is backed by Castlelake, another private equity investor, and was floated the same year. Metrovacesa SA, owned by Spain’s biggest banks, held an initial public offering earlier this year.

Shares of all three developers have declined this year at more than twice the rate of the local stock index, a reminder that the market’s recovery remains fragile, with higher interest rates and an economic slowdown on the horizon.

For the Bioclimatic City La Encina, that means it may take longer still until Alba gets new neighbors. Prices for half-finished chalets were slashed by half, according to residents. Some now sell for as little as 16,700 euros, half the cost of a mid-range car.

Alba doubts such cuts will lure buyers. Then again, that may not be a bad thing, he says in summing up the development’s advantages: “It’s very peaceful.”

Original story: Bloomberg (by Charlie Devereux)

Edited by: Carmel Drake

BBVA Research: Building Permits for New Homes Double in 3 Years

12 November 2018 – Cinco Días

The recovery is being boosted by construction activity in the real estate sector. 2018 is going to close with the granting of more than 100,000 permits for the construction of new homes, which represents twice the number of permits granted in 2015, according to estimates from BBVA Research. During that year, activity in the sector started to recover, after years in free fall. The real estate construction segment is whereby returning to six-digit figures, something that has not been seen for eight years.

Until August, the most recent data available from the Ministry of Development, just over 68,000 permits had been granted, up by 26% compared to the same period last year. The data from that month reflects that it was the best August on record since 2008.

The sector may be recovering but it is still light years away from the property fever experienced a decade ago. To give some perspective, the 100,000 new build permits that are going to be granted this year are eight times fewer than the figure recorded in 2006, when the highest ever number of permits was issued (865,561). In April of that year alone, 126,753 permits were granted, a figure that comfortably exceeded the number expected to be issued during 2018 as a whole.

The exact opposite was seen in 2013, when the number of permits hit rock bottom: during that year, just 34,288 permits were granted, the absolute minimum in the whole historical series (whose data goes back to 1992). The following year, there was a slight increase in permits (of 2%) but it was not really until 2015 when the figures started to recover with any strength, up by 43% that year. Since then, the number of construction permits granted has followed a stable growth path, with YoY increases of around 25%.

According to the research from BBVA, the increase in permits forms part of the favourable context in which the market is developing. During the third quarter of the year, employment in the construction sector grew by 1.3%, loans for home purchases increased by 16.8% YoY and house sales in August were almost 10% higher than during the same month last year.

A large part of the still moderate and stepped growth in terms of construction permits is due to the fact that the number of leftover homes constructed during the bubble, which still have not been sold, is still “high and disproportionate for the levels of demand in six out of every ten provinces”. There are 1.2 million leftover homes in total, according to the statistical yearbook for the real estate market compiled by the consultancy firm Acuña & Asociados.

Nevertheless, that stock of homes is very dispersed throughout the country: the consultancy firm calculates that one third of those homes are located in areas with zero or very low demand, whereas in the main cities, new build homes are needed, something that is being confirmed by the significant increases in house prices.

Madrid is the city that accounts for the most building permits (both for new construction and renovation or refurbishment). So far this year, work has started to build or renovate 7,000 homes in the Spanish capital. It is followed, at a distance, by Barcelona, with just over 2,200 homes. Next in the ranking are Valencia (1,640), Málaga (1,400), Zaragoza (1,060), and Sevilla ( 830). Those six cities – which account for almost 20% of the population – account for 17% of all of the permits granted so far this year (…).

Original story: Cinco Días

Translation: Carmel Drake