Research on the Financing of Residential Development

Description

The Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage is procuring, from a single tenderer, a research paper intended to widen the Department’s understanding of the financing of residential development in Ireland through the development cycle, from project inception to sale, focusing on generating a detailed description of the financial flows, encompassing project level finance and how those flows relate to the parent company’s corporate balance sheet, including land assets. The Department’s goal is to understand, over the lifespan of a set of representative private, profit-oriented, residential construction projects, the sources, flows, timings and costs of the various forms of development financing, including financing during the pre-construction period, that is, of the purchase and holding of land and design/consent phases, in addition to the financing of the construction and development-exit (sales period) phases of a residential project. As such, the output will be organised with reference to a small number of case studies that demonstrate the financial flows. Aspects of interest include: - Different project typologies, for instance high density brownfield vs peripheral greenfield housing, and how those project typologies influence the timing and costs of financing; - The opportunity cost of developer’s equity; - The extent to which loans and funding are collateralised, and the nature and value of the assets used as collateral; - Land acquisition finance, including how typical land loan values are calculated, the broader terms of such loans and the degree to which the cost of finance can change depending on whether a site has planning permission or not; - How project risk is assessed and quantified from the perspective of lenders, including market conditions, construction risks, the developer's track record, housing typologies, and the role of developers in providing potential providers of finance with feasibility studies to mitigate risks and provide a comprehensive understanding of the project; - The potential range of loan covenants; - The costs of broker and lender arrangement fees, exit fees, and non-utilisation fees; - The different cost and timing profiles of senior and junior debt and the macroeconomic and project-specific factors which determine those costs; - How development funding is arranged to be released in stages linked to project milestones; - Whether interest payments are rolled up and collateralised or paid off in periodic instalments; - The use of refinancing once development has concluded but prior to sale; and, - How capital is restricted or recycled into further projects on exit, depending on the option deployed to finance at the start of a project. A further objective is to understand the degree to which variation exists, for instance, different costs and covenants which may apply to inexperienced or smaller developers.