The Ryan Review

ONE of the reasons foreign banks don’t want to do business in the Irish mortgage market is the slow pace of repossession when owners default on their home loan payments. It can take years, and thousands of euro, to get through the court system, with no guarantee the property will be recovered.

Even our own banks favour the securitised debt model, flogging off dozens of basket-case loans in a bundle to vulture funds who are paying a bargain price — low enough so that they have time to wait out the process.

They also don’t care about the optics in the same way as our bailed-out bankers do.

So, what is the Permanent TSB at? It has announced an extremely generous offer to landlords of buy-to-lets in dogged arrears who are willing to surrender their investment property (which could trigger a turfing out of the tenants), and the bank will write off all the residual debt.

For the beleaguered bank, it saves the cost and time of a court case, but in eating the outstanding loan it must raise the eyebrows of residential borrowers, people tempted by low tracker rates who bought a family home high and now can’t afford the repayments, and for whom no such deal is on offer, not even through insolvency, in most cases.

Why are the buy-to-lets getting the breaks? After all, they took a gamble, unlike the owner-occupier.