The sareb (Sociedad de Gestión de Assets Arriving from Bank Restructuring) and the Valencian government they are working on the sales half a thousand houses to increase the social housing park of the autonomous community, according to Sareb sources. The acquisition could mean a investment close to €50 million.
The sale is expected to take place in several phases. The first one around the month of April with the acquisition of around 335 homes for an amount of 31 million euros. The rest would be sold at later dates. Currently, the homes owned by Sareb have already been identified and will initially form part of this agreement. At this time, the Generalitat is visiting each property to check its status.
Sareb indicated that this will be the first sale operation to a public administration of this magnitude and that expect this deal can be extended to other communities autonomous. In this way, he considers that the principle of sustainability and social utility could continue to be applied and, at the same time, advance in the generation of income for the repayment of its debt.
With this objective, Sareb is working in coordination with various public administrations to assess their needs and identify the assets that can be made available through purchase and sale operations to increase public housing stocks for social rental.
vulnerable families
On the other hand, Sareb continues to make progress in its model of management of vulnerable families who currently reside in their homes, favoring their participation in socioeconomic support programs to overcome the situation of exclusion in which they find themselves.
Sareb is an entity created in November 2012 to help clean up the Spanish financial sector and, specifically, the successor entities of the 22 savings banks and their subsidiaries that were the subject of resolution processes. Sareb’s commitment is to proceed with the liquidation of real estate and loans acquired before November 2027. 50.14% of Sareb’s capital belongs to the State, through the FROB. The rest is in private hands. This company received the toxic real estate assets of the rescued financial entities between 2008 and 2012. In recent weeks it has been finalizing its first strategic plan since it became state-controlled in March last year. In addition to the financial objectives, the project includes a new impetus for its social housing strategy, in line with the principle of social sustainability that a law approved by the Government in January 2022 introduced among the company’s objectives. The presentation of the plan could take place at the end of March, coinciding with the publication of the company’s annual results, according to this newspaper.
The firm’s new social housing strategy has three main areas. On the one hand, work is being done to identify a substantial group of homes and land that can be sold to the autonomous communities for social purposes. The number of buildings that the company offers to assign to autonomies and town halls has risen from the initial 4,000 of 2013 to 15,000 expandable in another 5,000 of 2021. The problem is that the transfers have been much lower than those initially planned, despite the fact that Sareb assumes half the cost to make them habitable: barely 3,386 until June.
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The other major project is the transfer of land owned by them for private developers to build and manage social rental housing (in principle, between 10,000 and 15,000) for a term “equal to or greater than 50 years.” To call the necessary public bidding competition, Sareb has hired the consultancy Pwc for 386,937 euros, which is advising it on the analysis of the technical, legal and economic feasibility of the project. The first phase, that of analysis and valuation of the soils and how to do the bidding, will be completed in a few weeks, and then there will be a second one of four months to carry out the contest.
The third pillar of Sareb’s plan is the social management of inhabited homes that it has not transferred. The company had 1,243 socially rented homes at the end of June (families occupying properties owned by them, mostly from former developers, with contracts prior to the transfer of the assets to Sareb). In addition, last year it created a special department that is deploying a new social and labor support system that it plans to extend to nearly 9,800 families that already live in homes they own, practically all of its tenants (as of June, 1,297 were already in progress).