Real estate financing by banks continues to cause headaches for the Financial Markets Supervisory Authority FMA. The topic is an evergreen because it represents such an important factor for the Austrian banking sector, said Helmut Ettl, who was a guest at the business journalists’ club in Vienna on Wednesday together with his board colleague Eduard Müller. The Austrian institutes have granted around 130 billion euros for real estate loans to households alone, and of a loan volume of 209 billion euros to companies, at least 127 billion euros are for commercial real estate financing, according to the figures behind them. According to the FMA, the financing of commercial real estate in particular has grown very quickly, with Austria in fifth place in the EU ranking.
