A massive firesale of 850 properties has been launched by Ireland’s bad bank, including pubs in Somerset, apartment blocks in Canary Wharf and hotels in Cork
The National Asset Management Agency, which has been tasked with clearing the mountain of bad debt amassed by Ireland’s property developers, has launched a firesale of 850 properties including pubs in Somerset, towers blocks in Canary Wharf and golf courses in Ireland.
The bad bank has just published a full list of properties across the UK and Ireland that are effectively up for sale, having been placed in receivership. It has already been inundated with hundreds of calls from bargain hunters.
The full list is available here.
Some 32% of the list is in the UK and includes properties in all parts of the country. Properties in Ireland include golf courses, five-star hotels, medical centres, homes in Dublin’s salubrious Ballsbridge district and an airport in county Kildare.
At the top end of the list are trophy buildings in London including the flagship Louis Vuitton store in New Bond Street and a site destined for a Norman Foster-designed tower in the Docklands.
The tower is yet to be developed but was put into receivership earlier this year alongside a 28-storey block called the Forge, also in the Docklands.
At the bottom end are holiday homes on the Isle of Wight, a car park in Bangor, north Wales, and an off licence on Alexandra Park Road in Muswell Hill in north London.
The spreadsheet issued by Nama will be updated every month and shows the scale of the havoc caused by Ireland’s property boom.
NAMA revealed that three of the top developers are responsible for €8.4bn of the debt
Those interested in buying a house or apartment in London could do well to check the list for potential knock-down prices.
There are residential properties on Cromwell Road, Clapham Common, Hampstead, Gloucester Road and whole apartment blocks on the Isle of Dogs.
Commercial investors will already be casting their eye over some of the sites, which hit the headlines when they were put into receivership earlier this year including Odeon Cinema West End in Leicester Square. The cinema building was owned by a consortium of three Irish entrepreneurs, including former Ireland rugby manager Pat Whelan, and was once valued at more than £200m.
David Daly’s Louis Vuitton building and some other of his London property has already generated much interest after the developer was given 48 hours to clear his debts by Nama earlier this month.
Other UK properties include the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Shoreditch High Street, three sites on Westferry Road in London’s Docklands, residential blocks across London and pubs in Weston-Super-Mare, Hambridge (both Somerset) and Seascale, Cumbria.
Also featuring on the list are sites in Birmingham, Edinburgh, Essex, Kent, Isle of Wight, Leeds, Maidenhead, Plymouth, Salford, Sussex, Tyne & Wear, Warrington, West Yorkshire, Wigan, Wakefield and Wolverhampton.
In Ireland, the damage caused by broke developers is even greater with huge swathes of residential developments in Dublin and Cork now in receivership.
The majority of the properties, 220, are in Dublin, while 80 are in Cork and 52 in Limerick. The properties are for the most part houses, apartments and development properties.
Prime retail units in Dublin’s best known shopping district – the Grafton Street area – are up for grabs with pubs and offices on South William Street and Drury Street and Grafton Street itself.
A house on millionaire’s row Ailesbury Road is on the list as are prime office units in the same area of Ballsbridge. There is also a choice list of hotels including one on Fota Island in Cork and the Portmarnock Hotel and Golf Links in Co Dublin.
The list was released on the Nama website as the agency unveiled its annual results.
It revealed it had set aside almost €1.5bn last year to cover further write-downs on €71bn of loans it had acquired from five Irish banks.
“We’ve made enormous progress on a wide range of fronts over the past 15 months, and we’re ahead of schedule in respect of many areas,” said the agency’s chief executive Brendan McDonagh.
“Our expectation now is that the pace of activity will step up again in the months ahead as we move through the implementation phase of our work.”
Last year, Nama acquired 11,500 loans of 850 debtors from the five participating institutions. It paid €30.2bn for nominal loan balances of €71.2bn, a 58% discount.
