The package, including loans with a nominal value of €800 mln and repossessed assets worth €50 mln, received 10 non-binding offers in mid July from the same parties as for the bigger Project Amoeba package which was sold to Bain Capital earlier this year for over 20% of the nominal value. Other contenders were said to include a string of US asset managers and private equity investors such as Oaktree Capital, KKR and Bain Capital.

Binding offers for the portfolio are due by September 24, with a likely extension to the end of the month.

PropertyEU reported in early May that the portfolio was about to hit the market in Greece’s second major property-backed loan sale by a local bank. The package includes a total of 1,700 properties with over a third (36%) of hotel properties, a quarter of residential assets, and 23% of commercial properties in an attempt by the landlord to attract international investors. The real estate collateral is valued at around €500 mln.

Greek banks are saddled with some €100 bn of NPLs and are under growing regulatory pressure to tackle their bad debt problem. Earlier this year Bain Capital emerged as the buyer of the Amoeba non-performing loan portfolio with an on-balance sheet gross asset value of €1.45 bn in Greece's first major property-backed sale by a local bank.

UBS was the exclusive financial advisor of Piraeus for the transaction, which involved a mixed bag of secured and unsecured loans with a face value of €1.5 bn, according to experts. The secured portion of the portfolio was backed by €467 mln worth of commercial, residential and industrial real estate across 1,350 largely vacant assets and is in addition to around €200 mln of unsecured loans, for a total representing 40% of the loans’ face value.