Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 23 April 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Donal Forde:

Okay. Well, the market began to deteriorate in early '08. Now, what I mean by deteriorate is that essentially ... well, forgive me, I'll just step back one step further. If you're managing a property and construction portfolio, you lend for a significant period of time. You've to lend through a period in which land is purchased, in which houses are built and the costs are incurred before ... the revenue only comes at the end when houses begin to sell, or the office, the commercial development that has been developed begins to sell. The loan and the cash flows are predicated on that sale happening at a particular time and, from early '08, it was obvious that activity in the market was beginning to slow; houses were not selling in the way that had been expected and what that begins to do then is it pushes out the revenues on which those loan cases are based, so, from early '08, it was obvious that there were some developers who were going ... would not meet the cash flow expectations that we had and I would describe the deterioration in the loan book through the course of '08 as that dynamic. That's what was going on and it wasn't until '09 actually that the concern of inadequate security values began to really manifest itself. It's only then that it became obvious that asset values were falling to a point that our security was going to be compromised.

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