Tag: servicers

Echegoyen Explains Sareb’s Performance 3 Years After Its Creation

4 November 2015 – Europa Press

Sareb was created in 2012 and has been granted a period of 15 years to manage and sell all of the assets transferred to it, almost 200,000 in total. It has until 2027 to liquidate them. (…).

Sareb’s President, Jaime Echegoyen, has acknowledged that the company’s progress is “quite slow” in terms of the divestment of assets, but he is confident that sales will be “greater” in the future. “The market is not ready and so, we have to wait”, he added.

Since its creation, Sareb has managed to reduce its volume of problem assets by €7,420 million, which in percentage terms represents 14.7% of its total assets.

Nevertheless, it is now waiting for the right moment to make further write-offs, according to the management team at the organisation.

Evolution of the portfolio

When it was created, the ‘bad bank’ received around 200,000 real estate and financial assets and 400,000 collaterals valued at €50,781 million.

Sareb stresses that its portfolio has transformed since then, with real estate assets gaining in weight, at the expense of financial assets. They explain that this is due to the transformation of the balance sheet, since the performing loans disappear from the portfolio once they have been fully repaid.

Sales to June 2015

During the first half of 2015, Sareb sold 5,345 units to retail clients, at a rate of 30 homes per day, compared with the average of 42 in 2014 as a whole. Moreover, it has seen renewed interest in land, whose sales have multiplied by 3.6x “although their financial impact is still insignificant” in terms of the company’s total revenues.

At 30 June, Sareb’s asset portfolio amounted to €43,361 million, of which 74% corresponded to loans and the remainder, 26% to real estate assets (primarily residential, land and tertiary property). (…).

Servicers

The company’s activity during the first half of the year has been hampered by the entry into operation of four new ‘servicers’ or real estate managers, which has involved the migration of a “huge” volume of loans and properties from the nine originating entities to the servicers’ platforms.

According to Echegoyen, the migration has involved the transfer of all of the information and documentation relating to 162,000 assets, which represents for example, four million documents and 325,000 keys.

Since it began its journey three years ago, Sareb has reduced its volume of problem assets by €7,420 million, and has also repaid €5,400 million of the €50,700 million debt it had to issue in order to acquire the portfolios of loans and properties from the banks affected by the crisis. (…). As such, the company has reduced its perimeter by 14.7% and cut down its debt by more than 11%.

During the same period, Sareb has generated revenues amounting to €10,500 million, has sold almost 30,000 properties to individuals and has managed around 25,000 proposals from companies. Moreover, it has carried out 25 large operations to sell wholesale asset portfolios, mainly loans, an activity that represents just 20% of its turnover.

“Sareb has demonstrated its ability to divest assets and generate revenues”, says Echegoyen, who added that the model “works” and that the company “has become an international point of reference”, as well as an “example” for other countries facing similar crisis situations.

Original story: Europa Press

Translation: Carmel Drake

Centerbridge To Sell Property Services Firm Aktua

30 October 2015 – Reuters

U.S. private equity group Centerbridge Partners has appointed investment banks to sell Spanish property services firm Aktua, five sources familiar with the matter said.

Centerbridge is seeking to take advantage of an improvement in the Spanish property market where valuations of real estate assets are recovering after taking a hit during Spain’s economic downturn.

The New York-based fund has hired Bank of America and Barclays to launch a sales process for the company which offers a wide range of real estate services including property maintenance, rental collection and loan management, the sources said. Bank of America and Barclays declined to comment while Centerbridge had no immediate comment.

Aktua is expected to have core earnings of between €40 million and €50 million this year and could be valued at around €300 million ($329 million), or 7 to 7.5 times its earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA), two of the sources said.

The company, which employs more than 400 people in Spain, has already drawn interest from a series of international buyout funds including London-based Permira, another source said.

Permira, which is in the process of selling two of its Spanish portfolio companies, Cortefiel and Telepizza, declined to comment.

The sale of Aktua has yet to start but bidders are already lining up to examine the asset and its growth potential, the sources said.

Real Estate Rebound

Aktua has roughly €5 billion of assets under management of which €2.4 billion are real estate assets and the rest loans.

Based in Madrid, it makes an attractive consolidation platform for private equity firms which could adopt a so-called buy and build strategy and combine it with other Spanish property management firms, the sources said.

This would generate a flurry of deals giving U.S. investors, which swooped on low-priced Spanish real estate assets during the financial crisis, an opportunity to capitalise on Spain’s economic rebound.

Real estate prices dropped by more than 35 percent in Spain between 2007 and 2014, according to the National Statistics Institute.

Centerbridge broke into the Spanish market in 2012. It paid €100 million to buy Aktua from Spanish bank Banco Español de Credito (Banesto).

Other U.S. investment firms could go down the same route and divest property firms they’ve held for the past three years, one of the sources said.

In 2013, New York-based buyout firm Apollo bought 85% of Santander’s property management unit Altamira for €664 million.

Another Spanish bank, La Caixa, sold 51% of its real estate services arm, Servihabitat Gestión Inmobiliaria, for €185 million in 2013.

Original story: Reuters (by Pamela Barbaglia and Andrés González)

Edited by: Carmel Drake

Echegoyen Shakes Up Sareb’s Management Team

14 May 2015 – El Confidencial

The Chairman of Sareb appoints Alfredo Guitart as the new Director General of Global Transformation and does away with three business areas: Transactions, Restructurings and Assets.

Jaime Echegoyen (pictured above, second from right) has got down to business. It has taken just over three months for the Chairman of Sareb, who replaced Belén Romana in the role, to make changes to the entity’s management team. And the changes are not insignificant. In a stroke, the head of the ‘bad bank’ has done away with three business areas, those relating to Transactions, Restructurings and Assets, whose duties will now fall under the new Business team, according to official sources.

Having removed the role of CEO, this organisational restructuring at Sareb turns a ‘man of the house’, the until now Director of Global Transformation, Alfredo Guitart (pictured above, second from left), into the new Director General. In this way, Jaime Echegoyen will depend on a confidant from Belén Romana’s original team, to complete the first round of promotions focused around the areas of Legal Affairs (Oscar García Maceiras – pictured above, right) and Global Resources (Manuel Gómez Gilabert – pictured above, second from left).

These changes take place after Sareb externalised the management of its foreclosed assets to four real estate services (Haya Real Estate, Solvia, Altamira and ServiHabitat). The main person affected by this reorganisation has been Luis Martín Guirado, who has served as the Head of Transactions for less than a year – he joined the ‘bad bank’ in July 2014 from BNP Real Estate, where he was CEO, to replace Juan Barba.

In parallel, Sareb has set up a Direct Management team, which will report directly to the Chairman. This area will be led by Juan Ramón de Díos, who joined the bad bank at the end of January from Barclays, the financial institution where Echegoyen was previously CEO. The new figurehead will address those tasks that the company has decided to manage using its own teams, such as its relationships with large clients, institutional sales and real estate development.

The new director general will be tasked with coordinating and supervising the work performed by the servicers, “as well as the transformation process that these new servicers must undertake to comply with Sareb’s requirements”. For this, the bad bank will have two teams, one for the Network (Marisa González), which will be responsible for driving and monitoring the work performed by the new servicers, and the other for Products and Services (Enrique Martín Barragán), which will set the commercial strategy.

Original story: El Confidencial (by Carlos Hernanz)

Translation: Carmel Drake

RE Managers Ranking: Solvia & Anida Vie With Vulture Funds

25 February 2015 – El Confidencial

Banco Sabadell and its real estate arm Solvia have infiltrated the top ranking of (Spain’s) real estate managers, which mainly includes vulture funds. These funds now have (assets under management amounting to) €278,000 million.

The international funds have consolidated their position as the new players in the real estate sector after Sareb’s latest auction. In fact, together, the so-called vulture funds control a portfolio of assets amounting to more than €278,000 million, including land; properties; and mortgage and developer debt. There are some important exceptions (in the ranking), such as Solvia (Banco Sabadell) and Anida (BBVA), but the top positions are held by institutional investors such as TPG (Servihabitat), Cerberus (Haya Real Estate) and Apollo (Altamira), who monopolise the sector.

Following the bid for Sareb’s assets, the largest manager or servicer is Servihabitat, owned by Caixabank (51%) and the US fund TPG (49%). In total, the company manages €58,698 million, having taken on €19,725 million from Sareb. The entity was already ranked first or second-place, depending on whether the loans in its portfolio were included in the calculations, rather than just the properties.

Since the start of the year, Servihabitat has controlled 21% of the assets of the so-called servicers, including properties and loans. Following the auction, it now also manages assets of Nova Caixa Galicia, Liberbank and Banco de Valencia. This hegemony has been thanks to Sareb’s most recent auction, which was held less than two months ago, which awarded portfolios amounting to €41,200 million. The assets (awarded in that auction) have been managed by the winning companies since 1 January 2015.

The main upset (in the rankings) has been Banco Sabadell and its real estate arm Solvia, which has infiltrated the ranking of the top property managers in Spain. The bank was one of the few that did not sell its real estate portfolio to the vulture funds, like most of its competitors did, and as a result, it has become the fourth largest entity in the (servicing) sector, a surprise gate-crasher to the party, with assets of €39,765 million. Of this amount, €17,187 million came from the most recent auction, in the form of assets that came from Bankia. 43% of the assets that Solvia now manages came from Sareb. It has a 13% share of that market.

Off the podium

In this sense, another important development is that of Apollo. Previously it was the sixth largest player. Now, following the auction and its purchase of Altamira from Banco Santander for €700 million at the end of 2013, it has risen to third place. This bronze medal position reflects the fact that Altamira-Apollo now manages €46,566 million. It has acquired more than half of its property and loan (€26,056 million) from Sareb. The entity has a 17% share of Sareb’s market.

These increases have been achieved at the expense of another operator, Anida, which has dropped down the rankings to fifth place. Anida is the real estate arm of BBVA and has more than €25,000 million assets under management. It is one of only a handful of companies of this type, which, like Solvia, has not allowed foreign funds to participate in its capital. Neither Anida nor Aliseda, which was sold by Banco Popular to Värde Partners and Kennedy Wilson for €815 million, participated in the most recent auction and so they lost size in a business where critical mass is fundamental.

Haya Real Estate, owned by Cerberus, is still the entity that depends most heavily on the Sareb. It controls assets that mainly come from Bankia and so 65% of its portfolio depends on the Sareb contract, much more than Altamira (55%) and Solvia (43%).

By contrast, from all of the large players, Servihabitat is the one that is least dependent on the bad bank, despite having won some of the lots it has auctioned, since it already had a significant asset base. It depends on Sareb for 33% of its portfolio only, which means, on paper, that it should have a higher operating management margin than its closest competitors.

Original story: El Confidencial (by Marcos Lamelas)

Translation: Carmel Drake