The number of repossessed assets fell by 42% compared with the same time of last year. The number of vehicles repossessed dropped to almost half in the January-June. The peak had been reached in the first half of 2011, when more than 4,000 assets had been repossessed.
“Things are improving when it comes to repossession. The significant repossession wave is behind us,” says Felix Daniliuc, ALB chairman and general manager of Raiffeisen Leasing.
“All the companies in the industry are saying that. Pressure on reselling the repossessed assets is no longer that heavy, either.”
The crisis made a strong impact on the results of the leasing companies, which saw their funding volume down 70% to 80% and the non-performing funding go up. The leasing companies found themselves with thousands of repossessed assets on their hands in the first few years of the crisis and no one to sell them to, but things have greatly improved lately.
This year is the third in a row when leasing companies sold more assets than they repossessed. They sold 460 assets more than they repossessed in January-June. In 2011, they repossessed 300 more than they sold.
Total assets repossessed from bad payers were worth more than EUR200 million in March last year, according to the latest data available. ALB has not published such data ever since.
Besides the 1,300 vehicles and pieces of equipment taken back from bad payers in the first half, the leasing companies also repossessed 17 buildings. However, they sold about 50 repossessed buildings in January-June, eight times more than in 2013, which is a first signal that the market is thawing.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)