India's bank-auction market, by the numbers

Executive summary

• A ₹9,587 Cr distressed book is live. 7,620 properties are under the hammer right now or scheduled to be, spread across 33 states and 168 lenders. It is overwhelmingly a retail book: the median reserve price is just ₹27.9 L and 46% of all assets are priced under ₹25 lakh.
• Public-sector banks carry the risk. PSUs account for 71% of reserve value — ₹6,763 Cr across 4,943 assets. On a lender-segment basis the market is highly concentrated (HHI 5,191); housing-finance/NBFCs are a distant second at 11%.
• But no single bank dominates. At the individual-lender level concentration is low — the HHI is just 787, below the 1,500 mark that signals a concentrated market. Punjab National Bank is the largest seller at 15.9% of value, followed by Punjab National Bank and Union Bank of India; the top five lenders together hold 64%.
• Value is far more concentrated than volume. The Gini coefficient across assets is 0.79 — the most valuable 1% of properties account for 45% of all reserve value, and the top 10% for 74%. A long tail of small flats sits beneath a handful of ₹50 Cr+ trophies.
• Maharashtra leads the geography of distress with ₹3,325 Cr (34.7% of the national book), ahead of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Distress clusters in metros — Pune, Thane, Chennai, Bengaluru and Mumbai lead by district.
• The pipeline is front-loaded. 2,510 auctions commence within seven days and 7,409 within thirty — 97% of the entire book goes live this month.

The market at a glance

India's SARFAESI auction market is a high-volume, low-ticket business. The typical asset is a modest home: half of everything on the block is priced below ₹27.9 L, and the interquartile range runs from ₹14.7 L to ₹63.2 L. Yet the book stretches across four orders of magnitude — from a ₹0.1 L plot to a single ₹1,375 Cr asset — so a handful of large exposures carry a disproportionate share of the value.

Who holds the risk

Read as a credit report, the auction book is a map of where India's bad loans have landed — and they have landed, overwhelmingly, on the public sector. State-owned banks account for 71% of all reserve value being recovered, dwarfing every private lender, NBFC and asset-reconstruction company combined.

Lender concentration

Segment concentration and lender concentration are two different stories. While the public sector as a bloc dominates, no single bank owns the market: the individual-lender Herfindahl–Hirschman Index is 787, which sits in the competitive band. Punjab National Bank is the clear front-runner at 15.9% of value, but the book thins quickly after the top handful of PSUs.

Value is also unevenly spread across assets, not just across lenders. The Lorenz curve below plots the cumulative share of reserve value against the cumulative share of assets. The deep bow away from the line of equality gives a Gini coefficient of 0.79: the most valuable 1% of properties hold 45% of all value, and the top 10% hold 74%.

The geography of distress

Distress is not spread evenly across the map. The western and southern states — Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat — carry the bulk of the reserve value, tracking India's most heavily banked, most urbanised industrial belts. Geographic concentration is mild (state HHI 1,548), but the top five states still account for more than half the book.

The trophy assets

At the top of the book sit the large exposures that drive its skew — single properties whose reserve prices run into tens of crores. These are the assets whose recovery matters most to a lender's balance sheet, and they span residential towers, industrial estates and commercial blocks.

The pipeline

The auction calendar is steeply front-loaded. Rather than a steady drip, the book clears in waves: 2,510 assets — 33% of everything on the block — go under the hammer within the next seven days, and 7,409 within thirty. For a buyer, the window to act is short; for a lender, recovery is concentrated into a handful of intense weeks.