Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Independent)
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192. To ask the Minister for Finance further to the recent sale by Northwood Investors of 1 Warrington Place in Dublin for €43 million following its purchase from a National Asset Management Agency developer for €27 million in April 2012, if he has concerns that NAMA's timing of its decision to sell the property was the correct decision in view of the €16 million of profit at Northwood which NAMA has forgone. [31074/14]

Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael)
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The transaction that the Deputy refers to was conducted in entirely different market conditions to those which prevail currently.   As the Deputy will recall, there was very little transactional activity and no international investment in the Irish commercial real estate market at that time.   NAMA's decision to place the asset on the market was, in part, motivated by the need to generate activity and, in part, to facilitate price discovery. The price achieved by NAMA was the best price achievable given market conditions at the time.  Moreover, the transaction proved to be important in helping to bring about greater price discovery and it has since proven to have been a significant catalyst for the market's subsequent recovery.  The availability of NAMA vendor finance was a particularly important and innovative feature of the transaction and was a major factor in attracting international interest in the transaction.  I am advised that, for the ultimate buyer, Northwood, the transaction represented only its second ever investment outside the US.  International interest in the Irish market has since expanded significantly and has been an important feature of the market's recovery.

The Deputy will know that in the period between 2010 and mid-2013, NAMA concentrated its sales activity in Britain, particularly in London, because of the liquidity and demand in that market and because it did not consider it prudent to overload a fragile Irish market in which prices had not yet stabilised. NAMA resisted pressure to release large volumes of assets to the Irish market over that period because of the absence of demand and the very real risk of exacerbating the market's decline. That strategy has been justified by the recent recovery in the Irish market, a recovery that is enabling NAMA to increase the flow of assets to the market, with €2.5bn sold by NAMA in first 6 months of 2014, and to achieve much better pricing than could have been achieved over the 2010-2013 period.