Finance Ireland taps market for €220m

A deal will raise finance that can be used for new lending.

HSBC is managing the deal - dubbed Pembroke Property Finance - for the Irish lender.

The bond deal is backed by a portfolio of 139 loans to 78 borrower secured on 244 commercial properties. None of the loans is in arrears and the average loan size is €1.6m.

The portfolio makes up the bulk of commercial property lending by Finance Ireland since it entered that part of the market in 2015.

Finance Ireland, led by veteran banker Billy Kane, is also a big provider of car finance, and also supplies asset financing for SMEs and lends to the agri sector. It entered the residential mortgage market last October, when it bought Pepper's Irish mortgage business with plans to ramp up lending.

Its total loan book is around €1bn, across all segments.

Investor calls and meetings for the new bond deal will run from early next week and the deal could price by Friday.

The commercial mortgage- backed securitisation (CMBS) deal is only the second of its kind since the financial crisis.

In 2015 Deutsche Bank tapped the bond market to borrow against some of its big Irish commercial property lending.