Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 2 April 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Context Phase

Ms Marie Hunt:

What I would say to that is if one thinks back to the 1970s and 1980s, the commercial real estate market was an institutional market. There was then a situation where lending became much more readily available and there was the emergence of the syndicate model. So it brought a whole new pool of investors into commercial property that did not really know a lot about property. It widened the cohort and it brought a lot of new players into the market. We are now back at a situation where we are a more institutional market again so it is almost as if the cycle is coming through but it was very much fuelled by the debt situation, the availability of debt, the cost of that debt and, I suppose, access to opportunities overseas as well.