Good response for residential properties at SBI's e-auction

India's largest mortgage lender State Bank of India (SBI) successfully completed e-auction of around Rs.1,200 crore worth of stressed assets on Saturday with good number of bids for residential properties, said a senior official.

"The e-auction got good response. The trend was more in favour of residential properties. We got a fair amount of bids from Chennai and Delhi," Parveen Kumar Malhotra, deputy managing director and group executive (Stressed Assets Management) told IANS.

"We are satisfied with the response that the auction got. We will be collecting feedback from the people and fine tune our next auction," he added.

Malhotra said details as to the number of assets that were sold and their value are being collated and final picture would emerge on Sunday or Monday.

The bank had put on auction a mix of offices/shops/apartments/factory buildings and others numbering 300 properties.

Malhotra said the number of hits were large on the two websites where the properties were auctioned and the speed got slowed down.

"We had extended the auction time to compensate for the slow speed," he said.

According to him, the bank had saved sizeable outgo in terms of advertisement spend for auctioning stressed asstes.

As per the norms, advertisements should be given in two newspapers for every property auction but this time, the bank had consolidated all the properties to be auctioned and hence saved good sum, Malhotra said.

Agreeing that not all the 300 properties got sold, he said based on the feedback and the data collated, the bank would decide on going for next round of e-auction.

He said the banking major has taken a first step in this arena and could be the trend setter for others.