Real estate loans at the 10 largest banks

Top 10 largest listed banks by charter capital include: BIDV, VietinBank, Vietcombank, VPBank, MB, Techcombank, ACB, SHB, VIB and HDBank.

According to VietNamNet statistics, Vietnam Technological and Commercial Joint Stock Bank (Techcombank) is lending the most real estate in the system. In 2022, this bank has set aside 300 trillion VND (out of a total outstanding loan of more than 411 trillion VND) for the real estate sector, including loans to both businesses and individuals. The largest real estate business customers are Vingroup, Sun Group and Masterise.

Regarding personal loans, in 2022, Techcombank will lend to 46,000 individual customers to buy houses with a total outstanding loan balance of VND 190 trillion. The average outstanding loan balance per customer is more than VND 4 billion.

Bank for Investment and Development of Vietnam (BIDV) ranked second with outstanding real estate loans of up to VND 275,000 billion, accounting for 18.4% of total customer loans for the whole year of 2022. This ratio makes BIDV the bank with the leading real estate loan ratio. In 2022 alone, outstanding real estate loans at BIDV increased by VND 46,000 billion, up 20% over the previous year.

Admitting that this is a fairly high growth rate compared to the average growth rate, Mr. Le Ngoc Lam, General Director of BIDV, said that the bank focuses mainly on the individual customer segment. As of December 31, 2022, outstanding loans for individual home buyers were VND 217,000 billion, accounting for 79% of BIDV's outstanding real estate loans. Vietnam Joint Stock Commercial Bank for Industry and Trade (VietinBank) ranked third in absolute terms, with VND 265,477 billion. Mr. Nguyen Hoang Dung, Deputy General Director in charge of the Board of Directors of VietinBank, informed that outstanding real estate credit at VietinBank accounted for 21% of total outstanding credit in 2022.

Due to low liquidity, most banks are hesitant to lend to high-end real estate projects. Photo: Hoang Ha

At the Joint Stock Commercial Bank for Foreign Trade of Vietnam - Vietcombank, according to Mr. Nguyen Thanh Tung, General Director of Vietcombank, as of December 31, 2022, outstanding real estate loans at the bank accounted for over 20% of total outstanding loans, up 17% compared to 2021, including loans to real estate development enterprises and individual customers buying real estate. Of which, loans to individual customers accounted for about 90% of total real estate credit.

Vietcombank's financial report shows that total customer loans last year were VND1,136 trillion. Thus, the bank's outstanding real estate loans are about VND230 trillion.

At the Military Bank (MB), General Director Luu Trung Thai shared that MB has allocated about 8% of its annual outstanding loans to the real estate sector. However, real estate lending has decreased significantly in 2022 when MB's financial report showed that outstanding loans for real estate business activities only accounted for 4.91% of total outstanding loans, reaching VND 21,357 billion.

On the side of Vietnam Prosperity Joint Stock Commercial Bank (VPBank), the ratio of real estate business loans in 2022 is 14.39% of total customer loans, equivalent to VND 52,000 billion. However, personal loans to buy houses and receive land use rights to build houses account for 26.85%, reaching VND 82,922 billion.

At Saigon - Hanoi Commercial Joint Stock Bank (SHB), loans for real estate business activities last year reached VND30,419 billion, accounting for 8.33% of total customer loans. In addition, loans in the construction sector were VND60,441 billion, accounting for 16.56% and was the second largest lending sector by SHB after the wholesale and retail sectors.

It was quite surprising when Vietnam International Commercial Joint Stock Bank (VIB) announced that its lending activities for real estate business only reached VND 1,995 billion, accounting for only 0.86% of total outstanding loans, thereby becoming the bank with the lowest real estate lending in the Top 10 listed banks with the largest charter capital.

Meanwhile, according to the analysis of outstanding loans by business sector, the sector that VIB gives special priority to is "Household employment activities, production of material products and services for household consumption", reaching VND 203,000 billion, accounting for 87.68% of VIB's total outstanding loans.

The top 10 largest listed banks also include Asia Commercial Joint Stock Bank (ACB) and Ho Chi Minh City Development Joint Stock Commercial Bank (HDBank). However, these two banks do not disclose details of outstanding loans by business sector in their financial statements.

Thus, excluding ACB and HDBank, the remaining 8 banks in the Top 10 above have a total outstanding debt for real estate of 1.25 million billion VND as of December 31, 2022.

Meanwhile, the State Bank of Vietnam said that the outstanding real estate credit of the entire industry by the end of 2022 reached about 2.58 million billion VND, an increase of about 24.27% compared to the end of 2021, one of the highest growth sectors and accounting for a large proportion of 21.2% of total outstanding loans to the economy, the highest in the past 5 years.

Among the current commercial banks, some small-scale banks have a close relationship with real estate enterprises. These include: Sacombank - Him Lam, KienLongBank - Sunshine Group, SeABank - BRG, ABBank - Glexemco, NCB - Sun Group.

However, the financial reports of these banks all "hide" information about real estate loans, except for KienLongBank which partly revealed information when declaring the value of real estate assets mortgaged at the bank as 59,353 billion VND.