Elections will hamper progress of online real estate auctions

The upcoming local, regional, European and national parliamentary elections, all in the next few months, are set to put the brakes on online auctions and efforts to identify strategic defaulters, raising concerns among bank officials.

That is because the forced measures will be suspended for a week before and a week after each election process, with a number of debtors looking forward to this suspension, seeing it as a chance to avert the auction of their property.

Whether the parliamentary election takes place before or after August, it will constitute the third suspension, after the two rounds of local and regional elections on May 28 and June 2 and the European election on May 26, as well as the August break when auctions will halt.

All this is set to weigh on the momentum of auctions, that otherwise would have exceeded 15,000 in total during 2019. This is...