2023-11-10 20:32:42
Real estate prices have been inflated in many parts of the world due to years of low interest rates. City centers with their department stores and shopping centers on greenfield sites are no longer prime locations everywhere because consumers are shopping more and more online and often only a few consumers are lost in retail spaces. Even if it is easy to say in retrospect: these trends could have been recognized. They were already in effect before Corona. In the case of the floundering Signa Group, there is also a lack of transparency and a high level of dependence on founder René Benko alone, which could have deterred lenders.
But state banks under public law in particular have fallen for the dazzling self-made man, while Deutsche Bank, which rarely misses a scandal, is standing aside this time and can be happy about it. Even if equity investors in Benko projects such as the fund company Commerz Real and the insurers Signal Iduna and R+V have to tremble more, the banks will hardly come out of the Signa matter unscathed. It is true that a number of objects will continue to be built and operated, even if Benko’s empire does not continue to exist, which is still unclear. In this respect, the loans are by no means completely lost.
State banks expanded real estate business
But it is worrying how bad the timing of German state banks in particular in the real estate business is. Helaba, which is actually cautious, is facing a burden in that observers have been asking critical questions for years about the high weight of commercial real estate financing on the balance sheet: 44 billion euros out of a total business volume of 212 billion euros is not a small number, but rather an imbalance.
Christian Siedenbiedel Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 8 A comment from Hanno Mußler Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 18 Hanno Mußler, Archibald Preuschat, Johannes Ritter and Michaela Seiser Published/Updated: Recommendations: 24
Helaba can still be happy that it lost out to LBBW when it bought Berlin Hyp. For this Landesbank from Stuttgart, whose commercial real estate portfolio roughly doubled to 56 billion euros thanks to Berlin Hyp, this burden is more manageable given its balance sheet total of 364 billion euros. Bayern LB’s real estate business has also grown tremendously. With total assets of 273 billion euros, it amounts to 67 billion euros. This means that the dangerous imbalance of real estate loans in Bayern LB’s balance sheet is almost as large as that of Helaba.
#Helaba #LBBW #Bayern #lot #business