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The demand for cheap holiday homes on the Costa del Sol, especially those destined for the foreign market has revived the interest of Sareb (‘sociedad de gestión de activos procedentes de la reestructuración bancaria’ or bad bank) in completing the stalled building work on such properties.

villas in Benalmadena 300x192 - Bad Bank to Finish 116 Homes on Costa del SolThe company, created in 2012 as part of a condition laid down by the European Union in exchange for aid of a hundred billion euros to Spain’s banking sector, is responsible for dealing with toxic assets and has now turned its attention to two developments in Malaga province, totalling 116 homes.

Of these a hundred are concentrated in a residential estate in Casares, though the company will not yet say where. The homes are in the final phase of construction - 80 per cent built and in some cases lacking only electricity or phone connections or painted walls - and with works to re-start in July are expected to be completed by the end of the year and put on the market.
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Five years after Spain's property bubble burst, hundreds of thousands of new and unfinished properties remain unsold throughout the country. Meanwhile, some of the biggest companies in the world have had to eat humble pie, reduce their size, and in some cases have simply been swept away.

foto 137295 300x195 - Property Market: The Challenges Facing Spain's Toxic BankSlowly, and reluctantly, the property sector is facing up to one of the major reasons nobody is buying property: the huge numbers of homes that remain unsold, some of them unfinished. This is the case for the major financial institutions, as well as Sareb - the so-called "bad bank" set up to sell the vast portfolio of real estate accumulated by failed, and subsequently nationalized, banks after the property companies they had financed went belly up.

Estimates of the number of unsold houses range between the government's figure of 675,000 and the 815,000 calculated by savings bank CatalunyaCaixa. To this figure also needs to be added the close to half-a-million homes that are still under construction, according to both the government and the real estate sector. The areas with the largest number of unsold properties are, in order: Castellón, where one in four homes is empty according to CatalunyaCaixa; Toledo; Murcia; Almería; Tarragona; La Rioja; Alicante and Malaga.
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Spain’s bad bank failed to attract high enough bids in its first sale of commercial real estate and will cut the size of the portfolio being offered to make it easier to sell, Bloomberg quoted three people familiar with the matter as saying on Friday.

house in orihuela costa - Spanish bad bank reorders property sale as bids fall short: sourcesThe bad bank, known as Sareb, received more than 30 offers for the portfolio that were lower than it expected, said one of the people, who declined to be named because the information isn’t public. It will reduce the number of buildings in the package known as Corona to four from seven, the person said. A spokeswoman for Madrid-based Sareb declined to comment.

Spain created Sareb last year to absorb 50 billion euros of real-estate assets from lenders including Bankia group that took aid as part of the nation’s European bailout. Its failure to attract high enough bids may undermine growing optimism in Spain as the stock market has surged 20 percent this year and foreign investors including Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates buy into Spanish companies.
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