Unicaja has completed another sale of non-performing assets. The bank has agreed to transfer a real estate exposure (REO) of around €100 million to GCBE Advanced Solutions, a Cerberus servicer, and the Luxembourg-based SRPO Fund. This is the Ulysses portfolio, which according to market sources consists mainly of residential assets with some commercial property.
The figure represents approximately 9.7% of the total volume of foreclosed assets (REOs) held by the institution on its balance sheet. This exposure stood at €1.030 billion gross at the end of September, down 35.5% from €1.597 billion twelve months earlier.
The Bank’s total exposure to non-performing assets amounted to €2.379 billion, as it includes a further €1.348 billion gross in doubtful loans, the balance of which fell by 22.4% year-on-year in September, contributing to a parallel fall in the NPL ratio from 3.4% to 2.8%.
9.7% of ‘brick’ loans
Unicaja, like most banks, has repeatedly resorted to these divestments in order to improve the quality of its balance sheet and transfer the management of non-performing assets to specialised companies.
Since 2015, it has divested more than €3.6 billion in portfolio sales of all types of problem assets. Between January and September last year alone, it made similar sales worth €267 million and realised €8.5 million in capital gains, thanks to the high provisions on such assets, according to its latest financial report.
Of this year’s sales, 43% were residential properties, 27% were land and 30% were tertiary assets and work in progress. These figures do not include the transaction formalised in December with GCBE and SRPO Fund (Spanish Residential Property Opportunities Fund).
At the beginning of the year, the Bank sold €200 million of property assets in the Minotauro project to the Luxembourg Telesto fund and the French Tikehau Capital fund. With Cerberus, it has completed various operations such as the Centauro project, a portfolio of 100 million in real estate assets agreed in 2023, after transferring a similar portfolio for 200 million to the fund and Deutsche Bank in 2022, or another portfolio of 1,000 million in bricks and NPL acquired by Cerberus with the Davidson Kempner fund in 2019.
Unicaja has accelerated the disposal of toxic assets after a strong provisioning effort, and today its NPL are well below 3.4% of the banking sector as a whole. It has a provisioning buffer that covers 69.8% of the total portfolio of non-performing assets, up from 66.2% in September 2023.
Both investors are consolidating their positions. GCBE Advanced Solutions is emerging as one of the major servicers, with more than €25 billion in assets under management, after completing several transactions last year, including the purchase of Zolva’s Spanish and Portuguese business and the acquisition of Hoist’s NPL macro portfolio, in the latter case together with Intrum.
Original Story: El Economista | Author: Eva Contreras
Edition and translation: Prime Yield