Start Mortgages, the loan-servicing company owned by US private-equity giant Lone Star, has completed the transfer of €2 billion of mortgages that had been on its books to rival Mars Capital Ireland, after deciding late last year to quit the market.
The deal, which first emerged last November, has seen the management of mortgages to some 11,000 customers transfer gradually over a period of months, increasing assets under management by Mars Capital to more than €10 billion, Mars said in a statement.
Pepper Advantage, the largest loan-servicing player on the Irish market, manages almost €25 billion of loan assets on behalf of clients, spanning mortgages owned by overseas investment funds to active nonbank lenders and mainstream banks.
“Bringing more than €2 billion of assets under our management on to our platform is both an exciting expansion of Mars Capital’s business in Ireland and a huge responsibility which we take very seriously,” said Colin Maher, chief executive of Mars Capital Ireland.
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Start had been licensed and regulated by the Central Bank to operate as a retail credit firm from 2008, focusing on the sub-prime mortgage market. It had stopped writing loans in the years following the crash before being acquired by Lone Star in 2014 as part of a bigger portfolio of Irish assets.
Established in 2015, Mars Capital has seen significant growth, expanding from a team of 60 in 2020 to almost 200 employees in Dublin. The Start transaction has seen the workforce expand to 300, according to the statement.
In 2017, Mars Capital was acquired by Arrow Global Group, one of Europe’s leading asset-management companies specialising in private credit and real estate. Arrow continues to actively seek further deals to expand its footprint in Ireland.
The loans transfer will see Mars Capital act as the lead servicer for the Start Mortgages portfolios, handling borrower complaints, correspondence, payment collections, information and record management, borrower financial statements assessments and regulatory reporting.
The transaction will not impact the terms and conditions of the mortgages.
Elsewhere, Lone Star, which had been among the most active acquirers of Irish assets in the wake of the crash, agreed this year to sell a stake in Quintain Ireland, one of the State’s largest housebuilders. Quintain Ireland was set up in 2019 to develop thousands of homes across land the US investment firm had accumulated in Cherrywood, Portmarnock and Adamstown in the south, north and west Co Dublin, respectively.
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