Banks start to sell homes of clients with overdue loans

Hundreds of homes and plots, whose value starts from 5,000 euros and can reach hundreds of thousands or even millions of euros, are put up for sale by banks in an attempt to recover clients' overdue debts, but most auctions are conducted very discreetly. The rather good offers, 20-40% below the market price, are not publicly available on the banks' websites, except in two cases, Raiffeisen Bank and Bank Leumi. Under the circumstances, banks have to repeat the sale of a home as many as three times in order to recover debt from late mortgage payers. Unlike the American market, where banks publish auction lists on a specialised website - www.auction.com, in Romania financial institutions are not required to publish ads on their websites and in large circulation newspapers. Therefore, despite the large number of sales offers for mortgaged homes, potential buyers are not aware of them, and data on the number of homes put up for auction by banks are not publicly available. "I searched the Internet, but did not find ads for mortgaged homes put up for sale, and could not find any data initially on the banks' websites, either," said Petruta Marin, a 45 year-old pharmacist in Bucharest who currently lives in a rented home, and said she considered buying a foreclosed home on advice from a lawyer friend.