It was reported today by the Irish Times that PIMCO, one of the worlds largest Real Estate Companies has made tentative approaches to buy NAMA's Northern Ireland loans portfolio. Although none of the parties have confirmed or denied the story it is certainly a very interesting development in the world that is NAMA..
Effectively NAMA, the worlds largest property company, acquired up to £4bn worth of loans from Irish banks that related to Northern Irish borrowers. On the face of it this is a considerable amount of property loans. Rough guesstimates are valuing these loans today at around £1bn, which is still quite a substantial amount of money and real estate. The million dollar question now is, What is NAMA going to do with these loans? To date, they have done very little in Northern Ireland, only selling a few parcels of land and putting up some working progress money for other schemes. It would be fair to say that by and large most borrowers have found the NAMA experience very difficult and certainly from an economic point of view, Northern Ireland has not seen much of an upside as there has been little activity within the NI book.
The facts are that NAMA are now very open to selling loans having completed a few loan sales in the South of Ireland recently, and it would appear that selling of the Northern Irish book would be quite desirable on their part and make some sense.
The next big question therefor is that if a sale of the loan book were to go through, what would that mean for the borrowers. Very simply their liabilities would fall with the new owner of the loan book, and they would have a new opportunity to come to some form of arrangement / deal on their loans.
I think for the most part, the consensus amongst the property world would be that they would be open to a loan sale, as there has been very little progress made to date with the loans.
From an economic point of view, if the loans to be sold to a PIMCO fro example, and they started to aggressively manage the loans, then that would certainly mean an upturn in economic activity and for us that can only be a positive thing for Northern Ireland. We can see this thread developing in the weeks and months ahead . . . . . .
Lets watch this space ::
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