PROPERTY SEARCH

Date Published: 14/11/2022

ARCHIVED - Two luxury Murcia hotels bought during 2008 financial crisis sold to private investors

ARCHIVED ARTICLE -

The Mar Menor Golf de Torre Pacheco and Hacienda del Álamo resorts in Fuente Álamo were sold by the so-called ‘bad bank’

<span style='color:#780948'>ARCHIVED</span> - Two luxury Murcia hotels bought during 2008 financial crisis sold to private investors

Sareb, an asset management company known as the ‘bad bank’, was set up after the real estate crisis of 2008 in Spain to take on the so-called “toxic assets” of the banking system after investors went broke and were forced to offload their properties. Now it’s been announced that Sareb itself has sold two hotels in the Region of Murcia, the Hacienda del Álamo in Fuente Álamo and the Mar Menor Golf in Torre Pacheco, to private buyers.

Although Sareb has been managing the properties from more than a decade, the company explained that the two luxury hotels are considered “assets that require specialised management that go beyond Sareb’s strategic activities”.

In all, 23 such “assets” have been passed into private hands throughout the provinces of Murcia, Malaga, Valencia, Almería and Madrid, which amount to a total book value of 235.4 million euros.

The Torre Pacheco hotel was handed over by Polaris, along with several golf courses, in a desperate bid by the group to avoid bankruptcy; the company was forced to file for bankruptcy regardless. Sareb engaged a management company to run the property and its doors have remained open ever since.

However, the Fuente Álamo property had been closed for nearly ten years, and its original investor, Caixa Catalunya, handed back the keys before the hotel was even built. The job of finishing off the resort fell to Sareb and it was eventually reopened in 2018 under the Sheraton brand.

The bad bank also owns properties and land in other resorts in the region such as Corvera, El Valle, Condado de Alhama, La Torre, Camposol, Roda Golf, La Tercia and Hacienda Riquelme.

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Image: Hacienda del Álamo (pepefotografia.es)

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