Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 2 April 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Context Phase

Mr. John Moran:

We were never involved in loan-to-value calculations per se. That is the job of the bank, not us. What we would have been aware of, through general market knowledge and anecdotal pieces of people to people, was the level of types of loan-to-value ratios that were available in the market at the time and they could have been, I am sure, in certain circumstances, up to 90%, and, in other circumstances, they were exceeded by that. That, to us, is an exceptionally high level of loan-to-value ratio.

If I compare it to today, which might be a useful benchmark, a very high-quality investment property in Dublin today will get a loan-to-value ratio of perhaps 65% at the outside. One can see where the differentials lay.