GETTING PAID

Investors may soon be able to buy shares in a trust comprising residential properties seized from insolvent developers, The Sunday Tribune reports.

So-called Real Estate Investment Trusts are used by property companies as tax-efficient vehicles.  Last week the head of lending at NAMA, Graham Emmett, said that if the agency does seize apartment blocks it will look to use the trust structure to move these properties off the organisation’s balance sheet and use the cash-flow to pay down debt.

Such trusts are not yet legal in Ireland but NAMA is understood to have an interest in introducing the necessary legislation here, according to the paper.

The agency could end up with 16,000 properties in the greater Dublin area, some of which have yet to be developed but many of them part-developed or lying empty.