The announcement made by Pedro Sánchez this Sunday to mobilize 50,000 homes from Sareb, the so-called bad bank created by the PP as a result of the 2008 crisis, could end all the housing stock currently in the Company's portfolio Management of Assets from Bank Restructuring.
At the end of 2022 and as it currently appears on the entity's website, Sareb still maintains 47,600 homes. Catalonia is among the communities that could benefit the most from this measure, as 21% of all the empty homes owned by Sareb are found in this community, second only to the Valencian Community. In third place would be Castilla y León with 16%.
It is likely that it will not do so because part of those that, according to the president, enter that count of 50,000, are already inhabited by needy groups and others will be built on public land.
In any case and in the absence of knowing the fine print. The president's announcement raises doubts about how the agreement that the entity chaired by Javier Torres has just signed with companies specialized in real estate management (servicers, in the sector's jargon) and Anticipa/Aliseda, belonging to Blackstone, could be affected. for which both assumed the commercialization of these properties.
“We have a three-year management contract that can be extended to five years and we are complying with a business plan approved by the Sareb board. The affectation will depend on the number of homes available and the locations in stressed areas”, as explained by a spokesperson for Aliseda/Anticipa to La Vanguardia. Anticipa/Aliseda, a company that belongs to the Blackrock investment fund, currently manages 100,000 assets, 11,000 of which are owned by Sareb.
Sareb was created in 2012 to alleviate the banks' balance sheets that were crowded with real estate due to defaults caused by the bursting of the real estate bubble in 2012. It was the solution that convinced Luis de Guindos, then Minister of Economy in the PP government of Mariano Rajoy .
In this way, the toxic assets left the balance sheets of the banks, avoiding their bankruptcy or contaminating the larger entities that rescued them, as was the case with Caja Madrid, with Bancaja or BBVA, the small Catalan savings banks, among many others. The problem from the outset was that the valuation of the assets reached Sareb's balance sheet well above what they actually had on the market at the time of the transfer.
This has greatly complicated the activity of the company to evacuate its balance sheet. In the early years, no one wanted to buy these assets at a price sufficient for Sareb to achieve the objectives set out in its business plan, which involved draining these toxic assets and ending its activity in 2027.
With the recovery of the economy, the entity stepped on the accelerator. Of the initial 50,781 million with which it was created, 2022 closed with 27,716 million pending.
But if in 2012, 78% of the toxic assets on Sareb's balance sheet were financial and only 22% were physical homes, a decade later the situation has turned around. Currently, 60% are real estate assets and 10,800 million, 40%, loans.
“The problem with the remaining homes is that they are the most difficult to sell. On many occasions, they are even developments that were left unfinished in their day and that for their sale it was necessary to finish them or, in the event that they were finished, apply reforms to adapt their habitability after a decade in disuse ”, sources from the real estate sector explain to La Vanguardia. .
In the absence of seeing the fine print of what the Council of Ministers approves on Tuesday, that reality could clash with what is marked in the recent housing law. “In theory, the rent ceiling is approved for stressed areas and many of the locations of Sareb's homes are not in those areas. We will have to see how that is managed ”, these sources point out.
