HIGH-PROFILE house builder Manor Park Homes is in receivership with debts of €170 million after the company’s directors told its bank that the business could not repay the money.
Businessman Joe Moran and his family own Manor Park, which made headlines eight years ago when it bought former taoiseach Charles Haughey’s estate in Kinsealy, Co Dublin, for €45 million.
Bank of Scotland Ireland appointed Tom Kavanagh of Kavanagh Fennell as receiver to the business after its directors invited the finance institution to take control of the company, as it was unable to repay its debts.
Manor Park owes an estimated €170 million to the bank. The debt is secured against company assets.
Sources say that the firm has no other liabilities and that both staff and the majority of trade creditors have been paid up to date.
It has bonds in place to cover any costs to local authorities for providing roads, drainage and other such services to the company’s developments.
The houses it built are insured and covered under the Premier Guarantee scheme.
The company’s problems are a result of the combination of debt, collapsed values and falling sales and cash flows, that closed other players in its sector including McInerney Holdings and Taggart Homes.
In December 2007, the Moran family bought industrial holding company DCC’s 49 per cent share in the business for €181 million, using money borrowed from Bank of Scotland.
The deal was done just as the property boom had reached its tipping point. The Republic’s housing market went into a nosedive early the following year and values began falling rapidly.
Manor Park launched its Heathfield development in north Dublin in early 2008, pricing three-bedroom houses at €300,000; those houses are now selling for €150,000.
At the time, the individual plots it held for housing were worth €125,000 each. Their value has since collapsed to €9,000.
While the company bought Kinsealy in 2003, it has not built on the estate. It intended to use the site, which is close to Malahide in north Co Dublin, for residential development. The property is now under the bank’s control.
In 2008, Manor Park attempted to buy Clontarf Golf Club in Dublin for €100 million. The members voted in favour of the deal, but the sale did not go through. The issue was complicated by the fact that Dublin City Council owned part of the property.
Mr Moran established Manor Park in 1979. It initially concentrated mainly in the Dublin area, but began to expand into the capital’s hinterland with developments in Meath and Louth.
Lloyds owns Bank of Scotland. The bank has effectively pulled out of the Republic and is running down its operations through a vehicle called Certus.
