These 10,000+ Irish Homes Are Now Owned By Vulture Mega-Landlords
The vulture takeover of Irish housing began about ten years ago, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Celtic Tiger property bubble. As grossly inflated property prices dropped like a proverbial stone the government (through NAMA) and the private banks began to offload tens of billions of euros worth of debt in one of the largest debt fire-sales the world has ever seen.
But it wasn’t just debt that they were selling - they were also selling the assets that were attached to these debts. Assets that included farms, factories, offices, shopping centres and of course - homes - thousands upon thousand of homes and development land for many more homes.
Clancy Quay, with 845 homes, is the single largest development to be added to the #TrackTheVultures database to date. The tenants that live in Clancy Quay pay an estimated €20,000,000 per year in rent to the US corporation Kennedy Wilson.
The loans attached to these property assets were heavily discounted - by up to 90% in some cases - to draw in as many of the world’s vulture funds as possible.
And draw them in it did - from the United States, Britain, Germany, Holland, Israel and Canada they came. Vulture Funds and others with the resources to buy up portfolios of debt worth hundreds of millions of euros apiece.
The first wave of vulture funds were followed by Real Estate Investment Trusts, Asset Management Funds, Pension Funds and others who competed with each other to buy up as much Irish housing as they could - to turn homes in global financial assets and families into cash cows to be squeezed for every possible cent.
The Canadian-Irish IRES REIT is Ireland’s largest private landlord. It already owns 3,700 Irish homes, with plans for thousands more. This mega-landlord simply would not exist if the establishment political parties hadn’t laid out the red carpet for the vultures.
The Irish people have the right to know what’s going on within the housing sector - to know the full extent of the corporate takeover.
Until recently no organisation in Ireland was centrally tracking how much Irish housing these new vulture landlords were amassing - no government agency - no academic expert - no housing organisation - no journalist - no political party.
So in late October of last year, Éirígí launched the Track The Vultures project to identify exactly how much Irish housing is already owned by these mega-landlords. And to make that information available to everyone in a free-to-access, public database.
Over the last three months our activists have been using various online and real world sources to identify the housing developments that are already owned by the vulture landlords.
Today the total number of homes on the Track The Vultures online database passed the 10,000 barrier - a staggering number of Irish homes that are now owned by a handful of foreign and domestic mega-landlords.
You can view exactly where these 10,000 apartments and houses are located on the #TrackTheVultures page here