Spain’s banks drawn back to homebuilder loans as sales surge

Bloomberg

Some Spanish banks are advancing more loans to home builders and cutting their borrowing costs, eight years after they froze credit for construction as the nation’s property bubble burst.
CaixaBank SA, Spain’s third-largest bank, will this year lend €1.4 billion for developer financing, more than twice the amount in 2015, the lender said. Banco de Sabadell SA gave €850 million in loans to build homes in Madrid and Barcelona last year as the value of some new-builds rose as much as 10 percent, said Joan Bertran, head of real estate investment at Spain’s fifth largest bank.
“We foresee that new supply won’t keep up with demand and that will translate into healthy house price growth for these new-builds,” Bertran said. “Now is the best moment to finance and we want to gain share in this market.”
Financing for construction and real estate froze in 2008, helping to spark a real estate collapse that forced Spain to seek a €41 billion bailout for its banks four years later. As demand from buyers returns and financing costs fall, developers are building in Spain’s two largest cities where growth in house prices and rents is set to outpace the rest of Europe.

Future Gains
Madrid and Barcelona will lead future gains, according to Philip Wedge-Bernal, a London-based residential research analyst at Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. House prices in the nation’s capital rose 7.5 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier and 9.7 percent in Barcelona, according to Tinsa, Spain’s biggest property appraiser.
Sabadell finances at Euribor plus a spread of between 2.5 and 4 percentage points, down from a minimum of 4.5 percent two years ago, according to Bertran. That compares with around 3.25 to 3.5 percentage points over Libor for funding development in London, where financing costs are little changed from a year ago, according to David Yeadon, a London-based director at mortgage broker SPF Private Clients.
Spanish lenders were roiled by real estate construction loans during the financial crisis. Non performing loans and foreclosure properties with a face value of €36.6 billion were sold there by banks and managers from 2012 through 2015, according to Cushman Inc. There are still almost €290 billion of the assets to be worked out, the broker estimates.
Bankia SA does not provide finance to developers as part of its 2012 bailout package, a spokeswoman said. The bank lost about €19 billion that year, much of it from soured property credit A spokeswoman Banco Santander SA, Spain’s largest bank, both declined to comment on the lenders’ strategies for developer finance.
Jaime Pinilla, director general of CP Grupo, a property developer in northern Madrid, says his firm has 800 homes under construction or awaiting licenses. All have been sold and one of the main issues facing developers now is the scarcity of land on which to build, he said.
Banks are now financing as much as 50 percent of the cost of building land, said Pinilla. That’s less than the 80 percent financing for land they would grant before the housing crash but is a big improvement on three or four years ago when they would finance nothing, he said. “Demand has risen significantly in the last year and it’s down to the fact that the final buyer has more confidence,” he said in an interview. “The banks know that property developers are a source of revenue for them and they are more willing to lend.”