Unicaja Sells Problem Assets to Cerberus & AnaCap for €120M

23 January 2019 – Eje Prime

Unicaja is divesting its toxic assets. The Málaga-based entity sold two portfolios of problem assets amounting to €330 million to Cerberus and AnaCap at the end of 2018. In this way, it managed to clean up its balance sheet and improve its accounts for last year, ahead of the merger with Liberbank, reports El Confidencial.

The problem assets consisted of one portfolio of mortgages amounting to €230 million, which were sold to Cerberus and another portfolio containing property developer loans amounting to €100 million, which was acquired by AnaCap.

According to the latest published accounts, Unicaja held €3.9 billion in problem assets (flats, land and unpaid loans) as at September 2018, and so the two portfolios sold account for more than 8% of the total. In the market, it is estimated at the Málaga-based bank obtained proceeds of around €120 million in exchange for the sale of the two portfolios.

Original story: Eje Prime

Translation: Carmel Drake

BBVA Sells its Last Large Problem Portfolio to CPPIB

17 December 2018 – El Confidencial

The Canadian fund CPPIB has been awarded BBVA’s last major portfolio of problem assets. The investor, which manages the money of the public pensions in the North American country, is negotiating the final details of its purchase of €2.5 billion in unpaid real estate loans from the Spanish entity, according to financial sources consulted by El Confidencial. BBVA declined to comment.

The sale, framed as Project Ánfora, is going to close within the next few days.

CPPIB has won the bid, fighting off competition from two major US investors: Cerberus and Lone Star. The auction has been coordinated by Alantra and, according to average market prices, must have been closed for a price of around €1 billion.

For BBVA, this same represents almost the conclusion of the clean up of its real estate inheritance. Together with Project Ánfora, the entity, which is still chaired by Francisco González, agreed to sell €12-13 billion in property to Cerberus (Project Marina) a year ago. The final details of that operation are still being closed with the Deposit Guarantee Fund (FGD).

Before the sale of Ánfora and Marina, BBVA had a net real estate exposure of €5.5 billion, based on data as at September 2018. The aim is for the real estate inheritance to be reduced to almost zero by the end of the year.

The Ánfora portfolio also contains refinanced loans amounting to €900 million, a new type of asset in this type of process.

For CPPIB, this is the second batch of problem assets that it has purchased from BBVA this year. It already acquired Project Sintra, containing €1 billion in unpaid loans to property developers.

The Canadian fund broke into Spain a few years ago with the acquisition of Altamira, together with Apollo and the ADIA sovereign fund, the main investor vehicle of Abu Dhabi. CPPIB’s interest in Spanish real estate means that it cannot be ruled out that it will end up being the buyer of Altamira following the current sales process. Large vehicles such as the Canadian one use alternative assets such as properties to diversify their portfolios and reduce their dependence on stock market and bonds.

Original story: El Confidencial (by Jorge Zuloaga)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Sareb Puts 4 Large Portfolios Worth €3.2bn Up For Sale

12 March 2018 – Eje Prime

Sareb is in a hurry. The bad bank has put four large portfolios of assets up for sale worth €3.2 billion, in a move that sees the company getting ahead of the significant divestments that many of the large Spanish banks are planning to undertake.

Moreover, the company that manages assets inherited from the banks would be willing to add two campaigns to this divestment plan through the loan channel worth €1.25 billion and which, in addition to the portfolios that are coming onto the market, would allow Sareb to place up to €4.5 billion in assets.

Of the projects that it has brought onto the market, the bad bank highlights Dune. Through that operation, whose sale was thwarted in 2017, Sareb is putting up for sale €2.5 billion in mortgage debt, in other words, unpaid loans following the enforcement of real estate loans, according to Vózpopuli.

Two other asset portfolios that the bad bank is seeking to market are Project Nora and Project Bidasoa. The first comprises unpaid loans over residential homes for a value that ranges between €300 million and €400 million. Meanwhile, Bidasoa is a debt linked to land located all over Spain that, in total, amounts to €300 million.

Sources at Sareb, which declined to make any comment in this regard, only point out that the sales made during the first few months of 2018 relate to the company’s plan to “deseasonalise” its activity.

Original story: Eje Prime

Translation: Carmel Drake

KKR & Cabot Compete To Acquire Hipoges

31 August 2017 – Voz Pópuli

KKR and Cabot Financial are competing in one of the processes that has generated the most excitement amongst overseas funds in recent months. The two Anglo-Saxon investors are the finalists in the bid to acquire Hipoges, a platform created at the end of 2008 by former directors of Lehman Brothers, the investment bank that went bankrupt in September of that year.

The platform is controlled by Cerberus, with a 40% stake, and by its CEO, Juan Francisco Vizcaíno, who owns 18.3%. It is not clear how much of the company is up for sale, although the various sources consulted by this newspaper explained that the initiative to launch the sales process has been taken by the directors. The final price of the transaction could amount to €25 million.

The bid is being led by Alantra as an advisor and funds such as Bain Capital have participated in it, in addition to Cabot and KKR.

Hipoges has a presence in four countries, although most of its business is concentrated in Spain. In total, it administers almost €8,000 million for 22 clients, above all overseas opportunistic funds and financial institutions.

Intense competition

The platform advises investors regarding the acquisition of portfolios and the subsequent management of the assets acquired. Hipoges is responsible for administrating debt, filing claims to recover it, going to court and in the event that a property is repossessed, managing and selling it. It also competes with the major real estate companies, such as Haya Real Estate, Altamira, Servihabitat, Aktua, Aliseda, Solvia and with other independent firms such as TDX, Finsolutia and Copernicus.

Of the €8,000 million that it administers, 72% are unpaid loans granted to property developers and mortgages. The remainder are loans to SMEs (14%), consumers (12%) and invoices (2%).

By entering this process, KKR wants to take another step forward in its real estate strategy in Spain. After purchasing a portfolio of mortgages from Abanca – formerly NCG Banco – the North American fund is negotiating the acquisition of a platform that will allow it to continue gaining experience in the property sector.

Meanwhile, Cabot is another of the foreign groups that is most committed to the purchase of banking assets. It arrived in Spain in 2015 with the acquisition of Gesif and is hoping to enter the real estate business with Hipoges.

Original story: Voz Pópuli (by Jorge Zuloaga)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Deutsche, Apollo & Cerberus Compete For BBVA’s Largest RE Development

21 June 2017 – Voz Pópuli

BBVA has three multi-million euro deals on the table to acquire some of its problem assets. In the last few days, the entity chaired by Francisco González has received binding offers from three funds to acquire the portfolio known as Project Jaipur, comprising €600 million in unpaid loans linked to real estate developments.

The three candidates to buy this portfolio, the largest that has been placed on the market to date by the entity, are Apollo, Cerberus and Deutsche Bank, according to financial sources consulted by Vozpópuli.

According to the same sources, these funds have put around €200 million on the table, and the best positioned of the three is the German fund, pending the outcome of the negotiations. BBVA and Deutsche both declined to comment. The other two candidates, Apollo and Cerberus, have their own real estate platforms in Spain, Altamira and Haya, and so they almost always analyse these types of operations.

The Spanish bank now has a few days to decide the winner of the bid, although the result will be announced imminently given the interest in closing it before the end of the first half of the year, and thus being able to reflect it in the results that will be presented in a month’s time.

Selling off property

According to the latest figures, at the end of March of this year, BBVA held almost €6,500 million in property developer loans, of which only €1,700 million were up to date. Another €4,750 million were doubtful, with a provisioning level of 56%. Almost all of these loans were secured by land and finished buildings.

In addition, BBVA has another €13,500 million in foreclosed assets, with a coverage ratio of 63%. On Monday, the CEO of the entity, Carlos Torres, insisted that cleaning up this property is one of the group’s major priorities, in order to whereby improve the profitability of Spain. At the presentation of its last results, it announced a period of three years to achieve its goal of cleaning up its balance sheet.

Torres shielded himself behind the property balance to explain why the entity he leads did not present a bid for Banco Popular, after studying its possible purchase together with Banco Santander just two weeks ago. In the end, Popular was acquired by the entity presided over by Ana Botín, for the price of €1, plus a capital increase of €7,000 million.

Original story: Voz Pópuli (by Jorge Zuloaga)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Operation Tramuntana: CaixaBank Assesses Offers Worth €200M

31 May 2017 – Voz Pópuli

CaixaBank is accelerating the sale of Project Tramuntana, one of the largest divestments that the Spanish bank is currently working on. The entity chaired by Jordi Gual is looking to sell off almost €600 million in unpaid loans linked to real estate developments.

The three funds that have progressed through to the final round of the process are: Cerberus, Deutsche Bank and Bain Capital, according to financial sources consulted by Vozpópuli. Those funds have reportedly put offers on the table of around €200 million for the portfolio during the non-binding offer phase.

They now have one more week to analyse all of the loans in the portfolio before submitting their binding offers, given that the cut-off date that was initially stipulated for this sales process was 8 June. With this, CaixaBank wants to be certain about who has won the bid by the middle of next month, so as to have all of the paperwork ready to close the agreement before the end of the first half of the year and whereby include the results in its half-year accounts.

CaixaBank sold the second largest volume of problem assets in Spain in 2016 (€2,100 million), after Banco Sabadell (€2,800 million) and ahead of Abanca (€2,100 million), Sareb (€1,400 million) and Bankia (€1,100 million), according to data from Deloitte.

Buyers

Project Tramuntana is almost a replica of an operation closed last year, Project Carlit, in which CaixaBank sold a portfolio of loans worth €850 million to Goldman Sachs. In addition, the entity sold hotel loans to Apollo.

Of the buyers left in the running, Cerberus is the one that most urgently wants to purchase the portfolio, given that it did not win any of the processes that it participated in last year. The US fund needs to accumulate assets in order to leverage its two platforms in Spain, Haya Real Estate, which it purchased from Bankia, and Gescobro.

Bain Capital, meanwhile, was the largest buyer of bank portfolios in Spain last year, acquiring real estate assets and debt worth €1,700 million from Sabadell, Bankia, Cajamar.

Meanwhile, Deutsche Bank also had a busy year. On the one hand, it bought assets from several entities, such as the case of the Ocean portfolio, from Bankia, but it also sold the majority of the problem assets held by its own bank in Spain. They were purchased by Oaktree, which forced the entity chaired by Antonio Rodríguez Pina to recognise a provision amounting to €68 million.

Original story: Voz Pópuli (by Jorge Zuloaga)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Project Buffalo: BBVA Puts 4,000 Homes Up For Sale

16 November 2016 – Voz Populí

BBVA is stepping on the gas with the sale of its real estate assets. In recent weeks, the entity chaired by Francisco González (pictured above) has put up for sale its largest real estate portfolio since the outbreak of the crisis. The portfolio in question, known as Project Buffalo, contains around 4,000 homes worth between €300 million and €400 million, which the entity hopes to sell to international funds, according to financial sources.

The Spanish group is still one of the entities most weighed down by the property on its balance sheet, which amounts to €22,700 million, according to its results as at September 2016. €6,000 million of that figure relates to unpaid loans (doubtful and sub-standard credits) and almost €15,000 million corresponds to foreclosed assets. Even though it has a high coverage ratio (51%), BBVA has made a commitment to having an “immaterial” real estate exposure by 2018, according to its CEO, Carlos Torres.

Alongside this promise to investors, BBVA, like all of the other entities, needs to get rid of its real estate as soon as possible in order to make its business profitable again. (…). The bank chaired by González lost €315 million due to the Spanish property sector during the first nine months of this year, down by 24% compared to a year earlier.

In this context, “the strategy is to sell this exposure as quickly as possible, provided we do not destroy any value”, said Torres, speaking a few weeks ago. And for this reason, the entity has launched Project Buffalo.

This portfolio is the third largest, containing foreclosed properties, to be launched by a Spanish bank in recent years. The largest portfolio, Project Big Bang, was launched by Bankia and contained almost 40,000 homes worth €4,800 million, but in the end it was withdrawn after negotiations with Cerberus and Oaktree broke down. Subsequently, Sabadell sold 4,500 rental homes, worth €600 million, to Blackstone.

Now it is BBVA’s turn to whet the appetitive of the large international investors. Cerberus, Oaktree and Blackstone are all expected to study the operation, as well as Apollo, owner of 85% of Altamira and the purchaser of a small portfolio of homes from BMN last year; and Bain Capital (Sankaty), which acquired 2,500 properties worth around €350 million from Bankia a few months ago.

Project Buffalo is the sixth portfolio that BBVA has launched in the market this year, as part of a new drive from the new leader of the area, Javier Rodrígeuz Soler, Director of Strategy and M&A. He has taken over this role following Pedro Urresti’s move to HSBC.

The other portfolios include Project Vermont, containing €100 million of unpaid loans to property developers; Project Boston, with 16 offices buildings located in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia; Project Coliseum, whereby BBVA sold its consumer business to Link Financial for €100 million; Project Detroit, with 441 warehouses and industrial plots of land; and Project Rentabliza, for the sale of real estate developments.

Original story: Voz Populí (by Jorge Zuloaga)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Bank of Spain: Default Rate Falls To 9.44% In June

19 August 2016 – Expansión

Yesterday, the Bank of Spain published provisional data for 30 June 2016, which shows that the default rate decreased for the fifth consecutive month, to 9.44%, its lowest level since June 2012. The figure includes the change in methodology for classifying Financial Credit Establishments (EFC), which are no longer included within the category of credit institutions. In this way, the default rate has now been below the 10% threshold for the fourth consecutive month.

The decrease in the default rate has come despite the fact that total credit in the sector rose by 1.2%, the first increase since November 2015. Specifically, total credit increased by €15,682 million to €1.298 billion. “The decrease in the default rate coincides with the strong growth in new loans to SMEs and households”, said José Luis Martínez, spokesperson for the Spanish Banking Association (AEB).

Doubtful debt

The doubtful debt balance sank to €122,508 million, down by €3,689 million compared with the previous month, its lowest level since June 2011. Financial entities have decreased their combined doubtful debt balance by more than €70,000 million since the peak in 2013, when it exceeded €200,000 million.

Therefore, the clean up of the financial sector is now a reality. Nevertheless, some entities have performed the process more quickly than others. In the last year, Sabadell and Bankia stand out as the entities that have got rid of the most doubtful assets, having reduced their doubtful balances by almost a quarter each. Specifically, the Catalan entity has reduced its doubtful debts by 23.9% and Bankia by 23.2%. Three other Spanish entities reduced their doubtful balances by at least a fifth between June 2015 and June 2016, namely: Liberbank (22.4%), Abanca (22%) and CaixaBank (20%).

Several factors have contributed to the reduction in the doubtful debt balance. As well as the macroeconomic improvement seen in recent years, the entities have accelerated their portfolio sales to large funds.

Another way in which the banks have shrunk their large doubtful balances has been through foreclosures, especially of unpaid loans to property developers overdue by more than one year.

Original story: Expansión (by D.B.)

Translation: Carmel Drake

CaixaBank Puts 144 Hotels Up For Sale Worth c. €1,000M

20 May 2016 – Expansión

CaixaBank has launched a mega hotel operation. The Catalan entity wants to sell off the majority of the hotel assets that have come into its possession during the course of the crisis, as well as some that it will soon foreclose. To this end, it has brought Project Sun onto the market, advised by N+1, whereby it is looking to sell its exposure in 144 hotels, valued at almost €1,000 million, according to financial sources.

The operation is divided into two portfolios: one with unpaid loans secured by 112 hotels; and the other with 32 hotel assets already foreclosed by the entity. In total, the properties that CaixaBank wants to sell contain almost 11,000 rooms.

This is the largest financial operation involving the divestment of hotels launched to date in the Spanish market. Bankia undertook a similar operation in 2014, with Project Amazonas, containing hotels worth €800 million, which were awarded to the specialist fund Starwood; and another one in 2015 for €400 million – known as Project Castle, which was sold to Davidson Kempner Capital and Bank of America.

Market trend

Santander and Sareb also wanted to join the party. Last year, the entity led by Ana Botín launched Project Formentera, containing 17 hotels worth €170 million. Meanwhile, Sareb, put a portfolio up for sale containing assets inherited from Polaris World, which were worth €500 million before they were transferred to the bad bank. Both operations have been postponed until this year.

The operation launched recently by CaixaBank has been distributed amongst investors. The entity hopes to close the deal during the month of July. Of the 144 hotels, two thirds are located in Andalucía (37), Cataluña (22), the Canary Islands (19) and the Balearic Islands (17), with an average value of almost €7 million. Both Andalucía and the Canary Islands are regions were CaixaBank increased its presence thanks to the acquisition of Banca Cívica. The other assets are distributed all over Spain.

85% of the hotels are four- and five-star properties, and more than half are holiday properties, situated on the coast. The portfolio also includes rural and urban accommodation. This type of portfolio mainly attracts large international opportunistic funds, such as Cerberus, Apollo, Oaktree, Starwood – specialists in hotels – and Blackstone.

Once they have been awarded such portfolios, investors try to make profits from the operation by selling the hotels to large specialist groups or to local property developers; and by restructuring the debt. Project Sun contains 108 loans, of which 35 are up to date and 75 are overdue. (…).

Clean-up

For CaixaBank, this type of operation allows it to reduce its default rate, obtain profits – depending on the price paid – and release provisions. The Catalan entity held €9,500 million of problem assets (net of provisions) linked to the real estate sector at the end of the first quarter 2016. This figure had decreased by 11% in the last year thanks to the sale of portfolios and foreclosed assets through Servihabitat.

In addition to this portfolio, the Catalan entity has another group of assets up for sale, Project Carlit, advised by PwC, through which it hopes to sell of €790 million in doubtful loans to property developers.

Original story: Expansión (by Jorge Zuloaga)

Translation: Carmel Drake

Bank Of Spain: Default Rate Fell To 10.2% In 2015

22 February 2016 – Cinco Días

The default rate of loans granted by banks, savings banks, credit cooperatives and other financial entities operating in Spain ended last year with another decrease, taking it down to 10.12%, its lowest level since July 2012, compared with 10.35% in November and 12.51% at the end of 2014.

According to the provisional data published on Thursday by the Bank of Spain, this latest decrease in the default rate comes after the cumulative unpaid loan balance in the sector decreased by more than €4,000 million (in December), to €134,327 million, in line with the drop in the total loan balance granted by all of these institutions, which decreased slightly to €1,327 billion, from €1,342 billion a month earlier.

The loan portfolio held by Spain’s financial sector has decreased by just over €53,000 million since the end of 2014, from €1,380 billion, as a result of the deleveraging performed by families and companies alike.

Meanwhile, doubtful debts have recorded a dramatic cut over the last 12 months, falling by €38,276 million from their balance at the end of 2014 (€172,603 million).

Moreover, the aggregate arrears recorded by banks, savings banks and cooperatives, excluding credit institutions (EFCs) also improved at the end of 2015, down to 10.20%, from 10.40% in November and 12.61% in December 2014.

In this case, the balance of doubtful debts also decreased to €1,274 billion, from €1,289 billion a month earlier.

In the case of credit institutions (EFCs), the percentage of bad debts decreased to 7.07%, its lowest level for seven years, since February 2009, after it had remained at 8.69% for three consecutive months.

The loan portfolio of these entities, whose main business is the financing of large consumer goods, such as cars, furniture, electronic goods and appliances, continued to grow, in line with the trend during the year, to reach €39,859 million.

By contrast, unpaid debts decreased to €2,818 million, down from €2,925 million, which allowed the decrease in the default rate.

Original story: Cinco Días

Translation: Carmel Drake