GREEN PROPERTY is planning to defy the real estate downturn by making additions to its €1 billion-plus portfolio with the acquisition of retail, office and industrial assets in Ireland and England.
Finance director Mark Munro declined to put a figure on the likely scale of any transactions but said the company was well-placed to enter the market.
"We're in a very comfortable position to hopefully look at some potential acquisitions in the market," he said.
"We're reasonably lowly geared given that we haven't been chasing investment product and we've been building up our own book."
Asked if Green would be pursuing distressed assets that might come to the market, he said, "whatever comes up that's got value".
Although Green has a conservative investment stance, it is a given that its co-ownership by Bank of Scotland (Ireland) can provide access to funds in a lending market in which banks are conserving liquidity.
Mr Munro said the current portfolio held by Green, which was taken private by a management team in 2002, was worth "well north of €1 billion".
He was speaking after new filings for one of the company's main operating vehicles, Green Property Ltd, showed that it had a pretax profit of €12.5 million in the year to June 2007 after receiving €17.83 million in dividends from subsidiaries.
This contrasted with a pretax loss of €12.18 million in the previous year, although the figures are not strictly comparable as the business was reorganised in the prior period.
The Green Property Ltd accounts present only a partial picture of the company's performance as figures are not available for the ultimate operating vehicle, Green Property Investment Fund 1 plc, a variable capital investment fund which is not obliged to file public accounts.
However, the Green Property Ltd figures show that it had net assets of €463.54 million at the end of the fiscal period.
The adoption of a fund structure in 2006 followed the redemption in 2004 of a stake held by Merrill Lynch, which co-funded the management buyout with Bank of Scotland (Ireland).
Green Property chairman Stephen Vernon and other managers hold 50 per cent of Green following that change, and Bank of Scotland (Ireland) holds 50 per cent.
