Nama seeks commercial property register

THE PROPOSED register of residential property sale prices should be extended to cover commercial properties, the chairman of the National Asset Management Agency, Frank Daly, has said.

Greater transparency from the residential property register, which will be published by the Property Services Regulatory Authority later this year, would improve confidence among buyers, Mr Daly said.

The commercial market could also benefit from improved confidence if the proposal was extended, he told a meeting of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors in Dublin. All the information to create a commercial property register was available.

“It is really a question of people putting their minds to collecting it and putting it out in a manner that is easily accessible,” he said.

Mr Daly said he was “cautiously optimistic” about property prices stabilising but that a recovery across the State would be slow as prices were faring better in certain areas. There were encouraging signs in Dublin and more encouraging signs in parts of Dublin, he said. Nama would report an operating profit of more than €200 million for 2011 later this month after taking an impairment charge to cover further declines in property values last year, he said.

Making a profit after an impairment charge was “a good indication of the way the agency is working”, he said. The accounts have been signed off by the Comptroller Auditor General and will be sent to the Minister for Finance. He declined to disclose the size of the impairment charge ahead of the publication of the accounts at the end of this month.

Nama was on track to repay €7.5 billion of €32 billion it borrowed to buy loans with a face value of €74 billion by its deadline of the end of next year, he said.

The agency paid €2 billion off last week, bringing to €3.25 billion the amount of debt it has repaid.

Mr Daly said Nama would evaluate how its staff are supervising the management of the loans by the banks and then assess “whether there are other options”.

The 200 biggest debtors are managed directly by Nama, while the remaining 600 are managed by the banks under its supervision.