Real estate leasing reaches 17% of market and narrows gap on auto leasing

Real estate leasing accounted for 17% of the overall leasing market at the end of September, compared with just 6% in the same period of 2008, having fallen by "merely" 40% on a market where turnover fell on average to a quarter of the level recorded in previous years, according to statistics of the Financial Companies Association in Romania (ALB). The most affected segment was vehicle leasing, which also boasts the biggest market share, with the value of transactions falling from over 875 million euros in September last year to less than 210 million euros at the end of the third quarter of 2009. The share of vehicle leasing to the overall leasing operations thus went down from 71.6% to 63.6%. Leasing companies are not only facing the problem of business being slow on the segment of funding for the acquisition of vehicles, but also the increasingly large number of clients no longer paying their instalments. As a result, many companies have come to put up hundreds of ads for cars put up for sale after being repossessed from bad-payers.