Editor's choice: top real estate headlines worldwide

This week's top property news at a glance:

RBS achieves the near impossible with property reduction - PROPERTY WEEK
Royal Bank of Scotland - the UK’s largest property bank - has succeeded in speeding up its property loan deleveraging programme and curbing its losses in the first half of 2012. The bank’s total exposure to property dropped to £69 bn (EUR 86.9 bn) at end June 2012 from £75 bn at the end of 2011, Property Week reported. The largest reduction came in its portfolio of loans which it has deemed non-core which dropped from £31 bn to £27 bn.

The bank’s losses on its property loans dropped to £977 mln in the first six months from £2.3 bn in the year-earlier period. Property losses accounted for 30% of the bank’s total losses on loans, contributing to an overall £1.5 bn pretax loss.

The Irish portfolio remains a problem for the bank, however, as it still has almost £16 bn of property loans through its Ulster Bank subsidiary, half of which are development loans.

Segro ahead of schedule on disposals - FINANCIAL TIMES
Segro, the industrial warehouse landlord, is progressing faster than expected with rebalancing its portfolio in favour of a smaller number of good-quality properties. At the announcement of its first-half earnings presentation, the company said it had disposed of £503 mln of property during the six months to June 30 - slightly more than its target for the whole year. The Slough-based group also added a string of continental European logistics centres to its portfolio during the first half.

Empty Dutch offices hit German investors - DE VOLKSKRANT
Some 25% of vacant office buildings in the Netherlands are owned by German investors and roughly 30% of the vacant buildings are financed by a German bank loan, according to a study by national newspaper De Volkskrant.

The German owners are primarily investment funds and include KanAm and CommerzReal. KanAM owns the Blaak Office Tower in Rotterdam while CommerzReal has the former KPMG headquarters in Amstelveen in its portfolio. The former KPMG head office is the second-largest vacant building in the Netherlands with 47,000 m² for rent. The former head office of the Dutch statistics agency CBS in Leidschendam (near Leiden) is the Netherland's biggest empty building with 60,000 m².

Slightly more than half of the empty office buildings in the Netherlands are owned by Dutch project developers, banks and investment funds. State, provincial or municipal government bodies own roughly 10% of the vacant buildings while 3.8% is in the hands of Dutch pension funds.