By Joe Brennan / BloombergPerched on a chair overlooking a wood panel-lined room in Dublin’s High Court, a bespectacled Judge Elizabeth Dunne has become all-too-used to hearing from the victims of Ireland’s economic meltdown.
Each Monday, Dunne presides over repossession hearings, with one in 10 Irish mortgages now in trouble. At the end of last year, more than 79,000 borrowers were behind on payments or had loan terms altered due to “financial distress,” the country’s central bank said on Feb. 28.
“Things are getting worse and worse,” said Dunne, as she weighed the case of a couple about 114,000 euros ($158,000) in arrears on a 558,938-euro home loan, one of 74 cases on her list on March 7. “Putting off the evil day is not going to help.”
Irish mortgages account for more than a third of about 270 billion euros of loans that remain with the nation’s so-called viable lenders — Allied Irish Banks Plc, Bank of Ireland Plc, Irish Life & Permanent Plc and EBS Building Society. The country’s new coalition parties are not convinced “that there has been proper transparency or full disclosure by the banks” on home-loan impairments, Alan Shatter told RTE Radio on March 7, two days before his appointment as Minister for Justice.
“There has been a continual under-estimation of loan impairments in Irish banks over the past few years,” Ray Kinsella, banking professor at the Smurfit Business School at University College Dublin, said by telephone. “I am seriously concerned about mounting loan losses in their mortgage books.”
New Stress Test
The bad loans may be reassessed as early as this month when Ireland’s central bank concludes a third round of stress tests on the country’s lenders. The results will determine how much of a 35 billion-euro international bailout fund Ireland will need to draw down.
A year ago, Irish regulators stress-tested for a 5 percent loss rate on Irish mortgages. This year’s review “will take account of the deteriorating economic conditions and hence” loan-loss assumptions “may be higher,” said Nicola Faulkner, a spokeswoman for the central bank, by e-mail.
Ireland is suffering after a decade-long real estate boom collapsed in 2007. Already, the state has bought 72.3 billion euros of risky commercial property loans from the banks, at an average discount of 58 percent. Irish house prices, which quadrupled in the decade to 2007, have since plunged more than a third. Unemployment has tripled to 13.5 percent over the same period.
House Price Declines
This year’s tests may stress loan books against the unemployment rate rising to 16 percent, house prices falling 60 percent from their peak and “negligible” economic growth, said analysts including Jim Ryan and Michael Cummins of Glas Securities, the Dublin-based fixed-income firm, in a note to clients March 9. The central bank declined to comment.
More than 300,000 households, or about 40 percent of mortgages, may find their mortgages are worth more than their homes, so-called negative equity, before the property market bottoms out, said David Duffy, an economist at the Economic & Social Research Institute in Dublin, who estimates that house prices will fall by as much as half from peak to trough.
Morgan Kelly, a University College Dublin economics professor dubbed “Doctor Doom” for his bleak assessments of Ireland’s housing market, wrote in the Irish Times on Nov. 8 that banks face “mass mortgage defaults” and a “wave of foreclosures.” Kelly declined to be interviewed.
EU Bailout
Iceland, where almost 40 percent of residential mortgages were in negative equity by December, decided that month to write off mortgages and other household debt by as much as $858 million. Unlike Ireland and other western nations, the Nordic nation placed its biggest lenders in receivership in 2008 rather than offer taxpayer-funded capital injections.
Ireland has bolstered its banks with 46.3 billion euros of additional capital over the past two years. The nation was forced to agree to an 85 billion-euro bailout on Nov. 28, led by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. That package includes 10 billion euros to recapitalize the banks up- front and a further 25 billion euros of “contingency” capital to be used if required.
“When the teams from the EU, ECB and IMF arrived in November, they probably thought they would find huge holes remaining in the banks’ loan books, but they did not,” said Alan Ahearne, who was economics adviser to Brian Lenihan, the former finance minister. “It’s not that there’s some black hole in the Irish banks that hasn’t previously been discovered.”
10 Billion Euros
Still, a previous regulatory target for banks to hold 8 percent core tier 1 capital, a gauge of financial stability, “wasn’t enough to support confidence in the banks” given the economy’s problems, Ahearne said. Ireland agreed as part of the bailout to increase lenders’ capital levels to no less than 10.5 percent by the end of this month.
The 10 billion euros of initial capital destined for banks under the rescue package “pretty much covers our base case scenario” for remaining losses in Irish banks, said Ross Abercromby, a London-based analyst at Moody’s Investors Service, by telephone. “The additional 25 billion euros contingency fund would cover our stress scenario, which is pretty severe.”
Moody’s estimates that losses on Irish mortgages may be as high as 14 percent where the loan-to-value ratio is over 90 percent. That rises to 16 percent “in our worst case,” the ratings company said.
Household debt soared from 48 percent of disposable income in 1995 to 176 percent in 2009, catapulting Irish consumers into fourth place in 2008 in an international league table of personal indebtedness from 17th place in 1995, according to Ireland’s Law Reform Commission.
Savings Rise
On the other hand, Irish households’ net savings as a percentage of disposable income rose from zero in 2007 to 12 percent in 2009, according to the Central Statistics Office. The savings rate should remain around the same level for this year and next, the ESRI said on Jan. 20.
Irish Life & Permanent Plc Finance Director David McCarthy said he doesn’t believe there are undiscovered losses in banks’ mortgage books. The group, which has 26.3 billion euros of Irish home loans, saw arrears of less than 90 days peak in mid-2010, McCarthy said on March 2, and they’ve “been falling, albeit quite slowly, since then,” he said.
Bank of Ireland spokeswoman Anne Mathews referred to CEO Richie Boucher’s Nov. 12 statement to analysts that there was “clear evidence” that arrears were “beginning to stabilize.” Allied Irish and EBS spokesmen declined to comment.
‘Different Phenomenon’
The Irish home-loan market is “a totally different phenomenon” to the commercial real-estate market, said John Reynolds, chief executive officer of Belgian-owned KBC Ireland.
“Irish banks have been hamstrung by a narrative that has been allowed to develop that all their lending was as mad as their real-estate lending,” said Reynolds. “The reality is that the Irish banks, when they didn’t do the real-estate stuff, which was a seductive drug, did bog-standard, criteria-driven lending.”
“Banks are exercising huge forbearance on borrowers in arrears,” partly because of pressure from the authorities “but also because they don’t want to repossess houses as there’s no second-hand market to sell them,” said Kinsella, the banking professor. Lenders only held 585 repossessed residential properties at end-2010, according to the central bank.
The new government said on March 6 it may bring in a two- year moratorium on repossessions “of modest family homes where a family makes an honest effort to pay their mortgages.” Currently, mortgage holders can enjoy 12-month protection from legal action if they are co-operating with lenders.
The coalition also pledged to fast-track changes in laws requiring bankrupted individuals to wait 12 years before they are discharged from their debts.
Rising Interest Rates
The issue of full recourse for mortgage loans is positive for banks, if not for borrowers in negative equity, said Abercromby. “If that level of recourse is watered down, by introducing less stringent bankruptcy laws, you could be looking at higher losses,” he said.
There is also concern that rising interest rates will hit borrowers who have managed to remain out of trouble so far. ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet signaled on March 3 the bank may raise its benchmark rate from a record low of 1 percent as soon as next month.
Banks have already increased variable home loan rates from an average of 3.16 percent in mid-2009 to 3.87 percent by November, according to the ESRI. Lenders, including Irish Life and EBS, have hiked borrowing costs again since then.
Meanwhile, at least half of all Irish mortgages are so- called tracker products, with pricing linked to ECB’s key rate, according to the Irish Banking Federation.
Tracker Rates
While banks may be able to contain bad-loan losses on their mortgage books, “a big and ongoing problem is that a large part of their mortgage books are based on ECB tracker rates, which banks are funding at a loss,” said Karl Deeter, operations manager with Dublin-based Irish Mortgage Brokers.
Back in the High Court, Dunne is listening to how a house builder from Co. Cavan, close to the border with Northern Ireland, is 67,000 euros in arrears on a 360,000 euro home loan taken out three years ago.
Times are hard out there, says the man, who has a plant hire and quarrying business, but is making partial remortgage payments. “I understand that well,” says Dunne. “I see that every Monday.”
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