Despite the often violent protests to prevent the resumption of property auctions in Greece on Wednesday, the development was nevertheless greeted with a 6.5-percent rise, overall, of bank shares traded at the Athens Stock Exchange the same day.
Resumption of property auctions - usually for arrears beginning in the hundreds of thousands of euros and extending into millions of euros - coincided with a successful bond swap engineered by the finance ministry and the country's independent Public Debt Management Agency.
Resumption of courtroom auctions of foreclosed property and the debut of an electronic auction platform also coincided with meetings in Athens that members of a Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) delegation held with Greek lenders' top management. The SSM has repeatedly called for a "crystal clear" message to be sent to so-called "strategic defaulters", namely, that an unofficial moratorium of foreclosures and auctions is over.
Fifty e-auctions are scheduled for next Wednesday, with properties on the auction block all exceeding 300,000 in commercial (estimated) value.
No less than 500 to 700 e-auctions are planned for January 2018, with the goal by September being 1,000 e-auctions per month, and 2,000 in the last quarter of 2018.
Executives of Greece's thrice-recapitalized banks estimate that 40,000 auctions will need to take place in the recession-battered country over the next three years in order to return to the pre-crisis condition in the market, and especially to reduce a "mountain" of debt held by banks in the form of non-performing loans.
According to reports, the SSM has requested from Greek banks to proceed with 2,000 to 3,000 auctions every month until March 2018, given that stepped up "stress tests" of Greek banks will come at the end of February 2018, months before a similar process is scheduled for banks in other Eurozone member-states.
Out of 29 auctions scheduled at the Athens local or district court (Eirinodikio) on Wednedsday, 12 were completed, out of 20 that commenced. Another nine failed to commence.
Of two successful e-auctions, one involved a one-storey residence in the upscale northern Athens district of Kifissia for total arrears of 1.430 million euros. The second involved five warehouses, which went on the auction block for total arrears by owners of 500,000 euros.