FAP Barometer: More than Half of all Lenders Note Signs of Overheating on Germany's Real Estate Market

BERLIN, January 27, 2014 /PRNewswire/ --

Sentiment among lenders in commercial real estate financing has declined as the new year is getting under way. Having softened by 0.51 points since the fourth quarter of 2013, the FAP Barometer is now down to +1.53 points.

Particularly interesting to note is the respondents' drilldown of the real estate market to identify the actual sectors where overheating tendencies were observed. Among the 56.3 percent of respondents who said they had detected overheating tendencies, 70.3 percent identified the residential property market, while 13.5 percent named the retail segment and 10.8 percent the office real estate market.

Commented Curth-C. Flatow, Managing Partner of FAP: "General overheating tendencies have not been observed; they remain limited to certain regional markets. For instance, investors are not willing to accept every price hike on certain streets in Munich, but leave the market to private players. There is also scepticism regarding individual shopping centres or core office properties."

The new business of commercial lenders continues to show a stable performance. 35.8 percent of the respondents reported stagnation in the new business sector, whereas 34.0 percent said their new business continued to increase. The degree of differentiation in loan volumes keeps widening: 7.5 percent (previous quarter: 2.6 percent) finance new business projects with an average loan volume of more than 100 million euros, whereas 28.3 percent (previous quarter: 17.9 percent) reported average loan totals of less than 10 million euros in the lower bracket. Then as now, the majority of loans (50.9 percent) range between 10 and 50 million euros.

FAP Barometer Q1 2014 including press release and charts is available as download: http://www.fap-finance.com/en/barometer.aspx

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