Drowning in debt, Spanish property giant Reyal Urbis files for insolvency

It is Spain's second-biggest insolvency after Martinsa Fadesa defaulted on close to 7.2 billion euros (US$9.6 billion) of debt in 2008, stranding thousands of unfinished real estate projects and helping to precipitate a banking crisis.

The company, born out of the merger in 2007 of Inmobiliaria Urbis and Construcciones Reyal, is one of Spain's biggest real estate companies.

Its orange, blue and white logo is associated with some of the most emblematic excesses of Spain's decade-long building boom.

Reyal Urbis is the main developer behind Valdeluz, a new city northwest of Madrid intended for 30,000 residents but that has remained a ghost town since the first buildings were inaugurated in 2007, on the eve of the financial crisis.

“These are the last violent upheavals of the crisis,” said Robert Tornabell, finance professor at the ESADE Business School in Barcelona.

“This could be one of the last because almost all have already fallen.”

At the peak of Spain's property boom, the country was building nearly a million new houses a year.

But when Spain's real estate sector finally imploded in 2008 as the global credit crisis squeezed banks and ended easy mortgage loans, building activity dried up and dozens of property developers went bust.

The housing slump has battered the Spanish economy, the euro zone's fourth-largest, sending millions of low-skilled builders onto swelling unemployment lines and undermining the banking industry.

Reyal Urbis' net loss widened in the third quarter of 2012 to 257 million euros from 136 million euros in the same year-ago period.

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