Spain’s Sanahuja family on Thursday ceded control of Metrovacesa to creditors, less than two years after completing a highly-leveraged buyout of one of Spain’s biggest property companies.

The Barcelona-based family, which controls more than 80 per cent of the capital, told regulators it would exchange a 54.75 per cent holding in the troubled group for the cancellation of €2.1bn of debt. The family will also receive a small cash sum.

The creditors are Spanish banks BBVA, Banesto, Banco Popular, Banco de Sabadell, Banco Santander and Caja Madrid. They have also agreed to buy an additional 10.7 per cent stake in a side deal with mainly institutional investors, which the family has the option to buy back within four years.

The family owed the syndicate about €4bn, with most of the debt taken on during a complex division of the original Metrovacesa after a bitter boardroom battle for control in 2006. The company was split down the middle, and the family’s existing property assets rolled into the new Metrovacesa. The other half, now called Gecina, groups the former Metrovacesa’s French assets.

The deal was completed in February last year, about two months before Spain’s first high-profile corporate collapse in the property sector signalled the end of a 10-year housing boom. The ensuing credit crunch, and broader economic slowdown, has since hit demand for office space and shopping centres, where Metrovacesa is heavily exposed. In September, the company pulled out of a high-profile commercial development in Madrid, citing the “current economic situation”.

The company, which is saddled with about €7bn of corporate debt, last week agreed to sell back to HSBC the UK bank’s London headquarters for £838m, £170m less than what it paid in a record-breaking deal 18 months earlier. A month ago, it renegotiated terms on £240m owed to Legal & General, the insurer, for a 1m sq ft City of London site earmarked for commercial development.

The bail-out of Metrovacesa’s controlling shareholder is the latest in a series of rescues for Spanish property and construction groups.

Spanish banks with heavy exposure to the property sector have been swapping debt for assets and shares in increasingly desperate attempts to stave off the collapse of indebted developers.