Center Bank is concerned about credit cases – Diepresse.com
Financial market. The domestic banks are well positioned. But the central bank has a high view of the high lending in the real estate and construction sector.
Vienna. The good news first: The domestic banks made a profit of 11.5 billion euros in the past year. And although the surplus is nine percent below the previous year, it is the second highest value in the history of the industry. The capitalization of the institutes is now also impressive. At 16.3 percent, it is slightly above the EU average-that was not always the case.
However, the whole thing has a blemish: the number of needy loans (NPL) increases, with a share of three percent on all loans, it is now above the EU average of 2.3 percent, as can be seen from the report on the financial market stability of the Austrian National Bank (OENB). With this value you are still far from the level of earlier years (seven percent), but the supervisors still look at the development with an eye -catching eye. Because the quota increases primarily because just more and more corporate loans are. In this area, the rate has now climbed to 4.9 percent and « already close to the top, which is located at six percent, » says OENB main department director Markus Schwaiger.
The problem: The loans to the real estate and construction industry take a rather large position in the portfolios of domestic banks. Of 311 billion euros in awarded corporate loans, 41 percent accounted for these two sectors. Since 2022, the proportion of necessary loans has risen to real estate companies by 20 percentage points to 35 percent, and the plus made seven percentage points to 16 percent for construction companies. The increase in the needy loans by EUR 7.8 billion comes from these areas with EUR 4.9 billion.
Small houses affected
The proportion of commercial property loans in Austria is particularly high in a European comparison and is only exceeded by Estonia and Finland, as the OENB report shows. However, this also has to do with the specific structure, « how we live, » explains Schwaiger. In Austria you usually live for rent, which means that buildings have to be built and financed. Especially in the case of project financing, the failures have risen sharply, almost every tenth loan in the area is affected. In this business, the cash flow is used for credit returns, which no longer works, and the bank does not get its capital back.
Small and medium -sized banks are currently affected. With 47 institutes, the quota of failures is already over five percent. « These banks are particularly challenged to reduce these loans, » said Schwaiger. At institutes with a total of less than ten billion euros, the increase in the needy loans from 2022 to the end of 2024 made it 115 percent. According to the report, this also has to do with the fact that smaller houses only have limited capacities to sell these portfolios.
What is still striking: The value adjustments of the institutes do not currently keep the failures, says Schwaiger. On the one hand, this has to do with the fact that well -secured loans have failed. On the other hand, the unsafe part of the demands for three years must be valued. If one assumes that the failures would have started at the end of 2023, « the banks still have a year and a half of the time. And that will be one of the major challenges for the sector.
The supervisors therefore decided a long time ago that the banks would have to introduce an additional risk buffer. This applies from July 2025 and will result in the banks have to set aside around 800 million euros. However, the credit institutions currently have sufficient money, so that they simply have to « postpone » the money in their balance sheet. The announcement of the buffer has already sharpened the attention for this area in the domestic banking industry, said OENB director Thomas Steiner. In autumn there should be a re-evaluation of the buffer.
