(Bloomberg) — South Korea is taking steps to accelerate the restructuring of troubled real estate projects involving project financing, to prevent another debt crisis after last year’s turmoil.
A group of about 3,000 financial companies involved in project financing signed an agreement that will enable them to swiftly discuss extending debt maturities, supplying new funds and taking other debt restructuring steps if projects appear to be in trouble, the Financial Services Commission said in a statement Thursday.
The firms can expedite the restructuring process if a project involves three or more creditors, the total debt is 10 billion won ($7.5 million) or more, and three-fourths of creditors agree on the normalization process, according to the agreement.
The measures are a response to the debt crisis last year that was triggered by a default on a project-finance loan to a theme park’s developer. Korea was among the first countries to face a broad debt selloff after global central banks started raising interest rates to tame inflation, and the country’s authorities pledged billions of dollars in support for the $1.3 trillion local credit market.
Demand for real estate remains slugish in Korea, with unsold housing inventories jumping 30% to 75,400 at the end of February from three months earlier, according to recent data from the land ministry.
The FSS said it will set up a support center for real estate project-financing to inspect the progress of normalization and will make efforts to ease the burden on financial companies such as by flexibly applying soundness regulations.
The group includes banks, insurers, mutual savings banks, brokerages, community credit cooperatives and other non-banking financial companies.
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