Banco Sabadell has reached an agreement to sell 80% of the capital of its property platform Solvia to Lindorff Holding Spain, a Swedish company belonging to Intrum Group. Solvia has been valued at a total of 300 million euros. The bank is selling the platform and the housing commercialisation team, not the property assets or the promotion activity, which has recently started again.
The sale price, corresponding to 80% of the capital will be able to be increased by a maximum of 40 million euros if the expected conditions relating to the evolution of certain of Solvia’s lines of business are fulfilled. With this operation, Sabadell retains 20% of Solvia.
The operation is expected to be closed, conditional on securing the relevant authorisations, in the second quarter of 2019.
Banco Sabadell will generate capital gains estimated at 138 million euros (18% of net profit 2019) and the operation will have a positive impact on the capital Common Equity Tier 1 ratio (fully loaded) of 15 base points.
Solvia is one of the principal providers of property services in Spain, with more than 21 billion euros under management, and around 700 employees. In recent years it has sold more than 94,000 properties.
In recent months Sabadell has proceeded to sell the majority of its property assets, the portfolios Challenger and Coliseum, with book value of 9.1 billion euros, given that, as its CEO Jaime Guardiola pointed out during the presentation of second quarter results, the bank has no “property calling”. Those asserts were acquired by Cerberus, although their final price rose to 3.9 billion euros. This is is why the Cerberus fund has preferential rights and, in fact, always started as favourite for this operation. But Intrum imposed itself at the last moment.
