Only last year, the largest real estate sale operations made by Santander, BBVA, CaixaBank and Sabadell allowed the banking sector to reduce in 60% the total volume of toxic assets from 200.000 million euro (December 2013) to 82.000 million euro at the end of the first quarter.
Scope believes that in the next coming months new major sales of NPLs will be made, since the investment funds «are gaining scale and capitalizing their recently acquired platforms», explains the report quoted by Expansión, giving as an example Lone Star, which bought Servihabitat from CaixaBank, or the fund which will end up buying Solvia from Sabadell.
And it’s not just in Spain that these real estate vulture funds are interested in buying NPLs, Italy, Portugal, Greece and Cyprus are «countries which have significant volumes of toxic assests, not necessarily connected to brick and mortar and where there are opportunities to find value for these investors», note sources from the sector quoted by the same Spanish newspaper.