Tag: secured

D.E.Shaw Purchases €103m Of Property Developer Debt From Bankia

3 April 2017 – Idealista

Bankia has managed to sell Project Gold, a portfolio of property developer loans amounting to €102.97 million. According to market sources, the buyer is the investment fund D.E. Shaw Group. As a result of this operation, the bank chaired by José Ignacio Goirigolzarri (pictured above) has managed to decrease its doubtful debt balance by €77.24 million and sign its first portfolio sale of the year.

Project Gold comprises a portfolio of doubtful and non-performing loans amounting to €102.97 million, from a variety of industrial sectors, although the property developer segment accounts for the lion’s share.

According to a statement from Bankia, this operation allows the entity to fulfil a dual objective: to reduce delinquency, by selling off doubtful and non-performing loans, and to increase liquidity and free up resources for the granting of new loans. The sale of this package has reduced the entity’s doubtful debt balance by €77.24 million.

The bank has another batch up for sale: Project Tour is a package worth €166 million, containing 1,800 properties, including finished homes, land, commercial premises, industrial assets and hotels. These assets are located primarily in the Community of Valencia, led by Valencia; Cataluña, led by Barcelona; the Canary Islands, led by Las Palmas; Madrid and Castilla y León (where Segovia is home to the most assets).

The entity chaired by José Ignacio Goirigolzarri is known in the market as one of the most dynamic entities: in 2016, it had several portfolios up for sale in the market, including Project Ocean, a real estate loan portfolio worth almost €400 million, which was sold to Deutsche Bank; Project Tizona, containing mortgage loans worth €1,000 million; and Project Lane, with properties worth €288 million.

More than €2,000 million in homes and debt up for sale

According to data compiled by Idealista, the banking and extra-banking sectors currently have more than €2,000 million up for sale in the form of non-performing loans secured by properties and real estate assets (homes, premises, offices, industrial warehouses and land).

Some portfolios are well-known, such as BBVA’s Project Vermont, a batch of property developer loans secured primarily by newly-constructed homes, worth almost €100 million. Several funds were interested in acquiring that lot, specifically, Oak Hill, Fortress and AnaCap.

The same entity has several more packages on the market: Project Buffalo, which comprises homes worth €400 million in total. Another project from the entity chaired by Francisco González is known as Boston, which comprises 16 office buildings located in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, worth €200 million. Finally, Project Rentabiliza is a portfolio containing debt to property developers.

In addition, Liberbank has Project Fox on the market, a portfolio of real estate debt worth around €200 million. It is the entity’s first (but not its last) portfolio of unpaid mortgages.

Original story: Idealista (by P. Martínez-Almeida)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Project Traveler: Sabadell Puts A €500M RE Portfolio Up For Sale

14 October 2016 – Voz Pópuli

Banco Sabadell has taken the lead in the Spanish banking sector once again with the sale of its toxic assets. Over the last few days, the Catalan entity has distributed a teaser (information brochure for investors) detailing a new real estate operation: Project Traveler. The portfolio contains 30 hotels, 30 work in progress real estate developments and other debts to SMEs, according to financial sources.

The operation involves collateral worth €500 million and it is already generating a lot of interest amongst international funds.

With this latest deal, Sabadell now has €1,500 million up for sale, given that straight after the summer, it put Project Normandy on the market, through which it wants to sell doubtful debt amounting to €1,000 million. Following the receipt of non-binding offers, that operation has recently entered its final phase, which will last for around a month.

The entity chaired by Josep Oliu has been one of the most active in recent years in terms of selling problem assets. Sabadell wants to reduce the real estate portfolio that it mainly inherited from the acquisitions that it made during the crisis in Spain, such as CAM, Caixa Penedès and Banco Guizpuzcoano, as quickly as possible.

According to the most recently published figures, as at June 2016, the bank held €19,900 million in problem assets, having reduced that balance by €6,000 million over the last two years. Along with portfolio sales, one of the key elements of the bank’s strategy is the work being performed by its real estate arm Solvia. That entity sells homes through the bank’s network and agents, and is responsible for managing overdue debt.

Project Traveler has attracted attention in the market because it is the second portfolio containing hotels to come onto the market in 2016, after Project Sun, being sold by CaixaBank, which is in the very final stages of negotiation.

Other operations

After the short break at the end of July due to the impact of Brexit on the market, the sale of portfolios has resumed once again in recent weeks. The first operation involved Abanca, which sold €300 million in unpaid mortgages to KKR; and then came Sareb’s return to the market – it is offering investors portfolios worth more than €1,000 million, after a year without any operations following the introduction of the Bank of Spain’s accounting circular.

For the large opportunistic funds, such as Cerberus, Blackstone, Apollo, Bain Capital – formerly Sankaty – and TPG, and the large investment banks, such as Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, these operations represent one of the best ways of making money in Spain at the moment. (…).

Original story: Voz Pópuli (by Jorge Zuloaga)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Sareb Sells NPL Portfolio To Bank Of America & Hayfin

16 September 2016 – Expansión

Sareb has just sold a portfolio of non-performing loans worth €70 million to Bank of America and Hayfin Capital Management (founded by former directors of Goldman Sachs), which is secured by several residential buildings in Madrid. The agents of the operation have been Haya Real Estate and Solvia, who have declined to comment. Sareb does not have its own sales network, but uses the exclusive services of the two real estate managers, together with those of Servihabitat and Altamira Asset Management.

According to sources close to the operation, the discount obtained in the transaction has been 50%.

As a result of the new accounting legislation, operations are now a lot more segmented and therefore smaller.

Solvia, which belongs to Banco Sabadell, has been collaborating as one of Sareb’s agents for almost two years. It won the management of a portfolio containing 42,900 assets, of which 33,000 were properties originally from Bankia and the others were loans acquired from Banco Gallego and Banco Ceiss with various kinds of real estate guarantee.

In March, Sareb completed the sale of another batch of loans, which were secured by industrial logistics assets, hotels and offices, located in Madrid, Barcelona, Cáceres and Tarragona. The nominal amount of the operation amounted to €73.7 million.

The opportunistic funds, the typical stars of these operations, are starting to withdraw from the Spanish market and funds with more potential are now arriving, including Socimis and family offices. The funds that have sold portfolios in the last four years have managed to obtain IRRs of between 10% and 20%, according to business people in the sector.

Sareb was created in 2012 and is owned by the FROB (45%) and by the main banks (55%), with the exception of BBVA. 80% of its assets are loans to property developers and the remainder are real estate assets. Their total nominal value amounts to €107,000 million. By size, the bad bank exceeds its Irish counterpart Nama. Even so its market share barely reaches 4%, because it is a very fragmented market. The large banks compete directly with Sareb in the sale of properties, but bank bad has the advantage of time on its side. It has 12 years to execute its business plan and is under no pressure to list on the stock market.

According to the latest statements by its Chairman, Jaime Echegoyen, Sareb should stop losing money next year. Recently, it has started to develop plots of land from scratch, which will result in 700 homes and €100 million of investment. 21% of Sareb’s revenues are generated by the sale of real estate assets. It is currently selling an average of 27 units per day.

Original story: Expansión (by R. Lander)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Abanca Sells €1,400M NPL Portfolio To EOS Spain

14 June 2016 – Expansión

Two years after taking ownership of Abanca, the Venezuelan company Banesco has started to sell off the bank’s toxic assets. Yesterday, the financial entity headquartered in Galicia reported its first sale of non-performing loans, amounting to €1,385 million, which represents approximately 20% of its total NPL portfolio.

All of the loans were overdue and unsecured, which makes it one of the largest operations of its kind in recent years and also, concentrated in a single buyer.

EOS Spain, a company that specialises in collections management was the winner of the competitive process. It is headquartered in A Coruña and is a subsidiary of the international group EOS. The transaction generated profits of €57.4 million for the bank, according to a statement filed with the CNMV.

The auction generated significant interest, with participation from around twenty investment funds and entities specialising in the recovery of overdue debt. For this competitive process, Abanca was advised by KPMG, the same firm that audits its accounts.

The operation (…) will open a series of future transactions as part of Abanca’s strategy to divest of its non-performing assets. In fact, it says that it is already evaluating similar operations for its non-strategic assets, with the aim of focusing the business on providing credit to families and companies and to boosting the economy.

One of the upcoming operations will involve a portfolio of non-performing loans, secured by mortgaged assets, although that will be smaller than the portfolio just sold. By contrast, the bank will hold onto the other overdue unsecured loans so that they can be managed by Abanca itself.

For EOS, the purchase “represents the strengthening of its relationship with Abanca”, according to a statement from the bank, as well as an intensification of competition and an improvement in its position in the domestic market.

Improved capitalisation

The main effect of the sale has been on the solvency of the entity, given that it had fully provisioned all of the non-performing loans that it has now sold. Abanca calculates that with this transaction, it has improved its capital coefficient by five basis points since the first quarter of the year, when it stood at 14.8%, one of the highest in the sector. Meanwhile, the doubtful asset coverage ratio amounted to 60.8% during that same period. According to the annual accounts, Abanca had decreased its doubtful debt balances by 30% last year to €2,695 million as at December 2015; furthermore, it reduced the weight of foreclosed assets on its balance sheet to just 1%.

Of the total impaired asset balance, more than half (€1,900 million) are secured and only €114 million were overdue by three months or less (as at December 2015), according to details disclosed in the consolidated annual accounts for 2015.

Beyond its consolidated balance sheet, the entity accounted for €5,376 million of financial assets that it had written off. The bank explained that it was not including them on its balance sheet because it regarded (the likelihood of) “their recovery to be remote”, although it clarified that it has not stopped trying to collect the amounts due.

Original story: Expansión (by A. Chas and J. Zuloaga)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Project Babieca: Bankia Puts €672M Portfolio Up For Sale

21 October 2015 – Idealista

Bankia has put another debt portfolio up for sale, worth almost €700 million and secured primarily by commercial assets (offices and shops), land and industrial assets. The project has been named ‘Babieca’ like the legendary horse of the hero El Cid Campeador.

Bankia is continuing with the process to reduce the real estate exposure on its balance sheet and to that end, has put another loan portfolio up for sale, a technique that has been used all over the world, during the process to clean up the financial sector. In this case, the so-called ‘Project Babieca’ is in the hands of the consultancy firm PwC, which is looking to place the portfolio, worth €672 million, with international investors, according to financial sources consulted.

The portfolio comprises 3 different sub-portfolios, but Bankia hopes to sell them all to a single buyer:

Portfolio Jimena: contains loans amounting to €115 million, primarily secured by land (specifically, 81% is guaranteed). This debt is shared between 9 borrowers, none of which have filed for insolvency to date.

Portfolio Elvira: contains debt amounting to €172 million, of which 78% is backed by commercial assets (offices and shops) and industrial assets. This debt is distributed between 40 borrowers, of which 18 have fallen into arrears.

Portfolio Sol: contains debt amounting to €384 million, of which 73% is secured by commercial assets. This tranche is spread between 30 borrowers, 22 of which are solvent.

According to the sources consulted, Bankia expects to receive non-binding offers from a handful of investors by the middle of October and to receive binding offers by the middle of November. In this way, it hopes to close the sale of this package in December.

If it manages to complete the sale before the end of the year, Bankia will be able to add the achievement to another sale it has already completed of another debt portfolio worth €1,300 million, which mainly contained doubtful mortgages to individuals. That package known as ‘Project Wind’ was awarded to the funds Oaktree and Chenavari (in July).

Bankia has also closed another operation this year, the sale to Bank of America of a hotel debt portfolio at the beginning of June. That operation, known as ‘Project Castle’ comprised 91 operations linked to 45 assets. 56% of the total portfolio related to doubtful debts.

In addition, Bankia has another package of real estate assets up for sale at the moment, the so-called ‘Project Big Bang’, which includes a portfolio of residential and commercial assets and land, worth €4,800 million. This is a sale that the bank is also looking to accelerate and one that would represent the largest sale of real estate assets since the real estate bubble burst.

Original story: Idealista (by P. Martínez-Almeida)

Translation: Carmel Drake