THE PROPERTY crash may not be over yet, said Patrick Coveney, chief executive of food group Greencore, which had planned to redevelop its former factories into houses, offices and golf courses.

Greencore had planned to convert a 398-acre plant in Mallow, Co Cork, into a centre with 1,000 homes, offices, a hotel and golf course.

It has also planned developments at sites in Carlow and Athy.

“You would be insanely optimistic and absolutely naive to think there’s now a market for building out the sort of developments that were envisaged 18 or 24 months ago,” Mr Coveney said.

Greencore started outlining plans for the sites three years ago, just before the collapse of the property boom. It is “not clear at all that it’s bottomed out”, said Mr Coveney.

“I would question people who assert with seemingly absolute confidence that the property market is going to go up in years to come.”

Mr Coveney said Greencore could “in a strange way” end up as a competitor of the National Asset Management Agency (Nama), given that the Government agency was going to have “very significant control over the supply of property assets into the market”.

He said he was “pretty sceptical” of the concept of long-term economic value at which the Government intended to price some of the Nama-bound property loans.

He said that in principle he thought Nama was “probably a good idea”.

“But so much of it is going to be tied up in how it’s executed and, in particular, how value is ascribed to the assets,” he said.

Greencore controls 333 acres in Carlow and 40 acres in Athy.

While the company is completing work clearing the sites, Mr Coveney said their future depended on the property market.

“We can afford to be patient,” he said. “We’re going to be sensible about how we allocate resources until there’s a compelling case to do it.” – (Bloomberg)