On October 28, An Bord Pleanála granted planning permission for a strategic housing development of 67 houses and 35 apartments, along with a creche and shop, off the Rosshill Rd on the eastern outskirts of Galway city. 

The successful applicant is Alber Developments, the local property and construction company run by the Duffy family in the city. The site where the 102 new homes will come out of the ground is, however, owned by a separate entity called Fifinella Property Company.

Fifinella valued the land at €12 million on its latest balance sheet on June 30, 2020 – a figure it had revised up by a whopping €7.2 million the previous year. It is funded through a complex offshore structure and, just like 79 other Irish property vehicles nearly all named after remarkable horses in racing history, its directors are Luke Comer’s sons Barry and Luke Jnr.

The original Comer brothers, Luke Snr and Brian, have made no mystery of their homecoming in the past decade, having made their fortune from humble plastering beginnings by investing first in British, and then in German property. The wildest figures have circulated about their firepower as they multiplied deals here across countless sites, from their native Galway to the highly speculative south Dublin office market.

In an interview with The Currency two years ago, Luke Snr said the Comer Group’s entire portfolio was worth close to €5 billion with 20 per cent debt leveraged against it, having doubled its money on around €1 billion invested in Ireland alone.

So, what do the accounts published by Fifinella and its sister companies in Ireland and the UK say, along with further data from Europe? While there is no doubt that the family business is in the billion-euro league and highly solvent, the available evidence supports only around half of the claims above. 

We can see that the Comers have increasingly focused their investments on Ireland since they first turned their attention back home in 2011, at the expense of the UK, where they have continued to invest at a slower pace, and Germany, where they have been selling assets rather than expanding.

The chart below shows the start dates of subsidiaries holding the Comer Group’s properties in Ireland and in the UK (bearing in mind that these are not initial investment dates and figures – vehicles have bought assets and seen their value increase for several years after incorporation). 

Group companies in the UK now book property assets with a total value that translates to €376 million. While it isn’t possible to assess the value of the German portfolio based on publicly available data, it is clearly smaller in terms of both the number and profile of properties concerned. The group also owns two hospitality complexes in Greece.

In Ireland, group companies reported a total book value of €1.2 billion across over 80 properties in the Republic in June 2020. On that basis, the Comer Group’s overall property assets from Oughterard to Berlin appear to be in the €2 billion ballpark. Family members may well own other assets privately – they simply don’t appear in the filings of identifiable group companies or on their (admittedly out-of-date) websites. A handful of Irish properties registered in Luke and Brian Comer’s own names are individual homes or sites with little or no significant business potential apart from Luke Snr’s Brookville Stud and 80ha farmland in Dunboyne, Co Meath. 

On the liabilities side of the balance sheet, property vehicles or their offshore holding companies had external borrowings totalling €433.5 million. This was according to their latest accounts for 2020 in Ireland and the UK, but as old as 2017 or 2018 in Luxembourg. There may be more debt in Germany and Greece that cannot be traced from here.

Billionaires? Yes. Reasonably indebted? Also yes. The Comers may not have done as well as they would like us to believe, but they have done very well – and their wealth is now mostly located in Ireland.

Although a spokesperson for the Comer Group initially acknowledged a request for interview from The Currency and questions on its portfolio and strategy, they did not engage any further for this article. However, an investigation of over 400 documents available from group companies, land registries, debt issuers and planning authorities in eight countries tell its own story.

*****

Before we dig deeper into the Comer Group’s Irish presence, we need to look at its foundations overseas. Companies established by the two brothers in the UK since 1985 (with a minority stake in some holding and operational development subsidiaries for their long-time partner Tom Donnellan) tell the initial story of their rise to success.

They first got backing from Bank of Ireland in the late 1980s and 1990s, then moving on to Anglo Irish Bank and the old IIB (prior to its takeover by KBC) from the late 1990s, all the while snapping up apartment blocks, development sites and leisure centres in England.

The luxury residential development now marketed as Royal Connaught Park in Bushey outside London is symbolic of the period. Bought in late 1997, the old victorian school then known as the International United States University first appeared on the accounts of Chantstream, a Comer subsidiary, as a £7.2 million asset. 

The redevelopment of the campus, kickstarted in 2009 with funding from a syndicate of Bank of Ireland, HSBC and BNP Paribas, stalled when Chantstream became the largest of three Comer vehicles to go into administration in 2011 with £167 million owed to the three banks. In a move typical of the group’s operation in the UK, the Comers had also registered a charge against the property in favour of Anglo – one of many cross-guarantees still apparent in various filings by British Comer companies.

A year and a half into administration, however, the brothers re-acquired the three properties from the banks through new companies for just £71.6 million, administrators reported. Their vehicle Dalin Ltd paid £45.6 million for the Bushey campus. Separate filings show that the deal received the backing of Deutsche Bank – one of many deals between the Irish brothers and the German lender.

Having completed and sold the redevelopment of Royal Connaught Park’s historic buildings, Dalin is now left with £5.7 million in property assets, according to its latest accounts. It owes £20 million in debt to related companies used to channel Comer Group funds from offshore bases.

Royal Connaught Park.

Meanwhile, a sister company called Blessville Ltd previously used for another deal started a new life in 2015. That year, it simultaneously borrowed £8.6 million, acquired a £15.2 million development property and gave Royal Bank of Scotland security over “phase 2” of Royal Connaught Park. The modern homes now advertised for sale on the land surrounding the period campus as the Nova Collection are valued at £31.4 million on Blessville’s balance sheet, but the Comers will hope to fetch a higher price for them as the company owes them £41 million through a cascade of intercompany debt.

It is important to note that Comer’s 2011 insolvency was contained to the three vehicles that went into administration. Unlike other Irish developers, they did not see their empire collapse and find themselves forced into Nama or personal bankruptcy. 

Instead, they remained solvent enough to retain access to credit. In addition to Deustche and RBS, charges registered against their UK companies show that they were able to borrow from a wide variety of lenders over the past decade including international banks Investec, NordLB and NatWest, and alternative specialist lenders such as West One Loans and PGIM Real Estate.

One of the Comers’ main recent backers in the UK appears to be Swiss private bank J. Safra Sarasin, which extended a facility to several group companies in 2015 and took security over multiple assets and subsidiaries.

In recent years, the Comer Group has focused on a smaller number of larger deals. Two subsidiaries formed in 2018 have added over £20 million and £10 million worth of property to their respective balance sheets since, one of them as recently as last year. The Comers have not, however, formed any UK subsidiaries to conduct new deals since June 2020.

Their attention has been elsewhere – Ireland, which is the focus of this article. A lot more could be written about the details available from Comer companies in the UK but for today’s purpose, we’ll end with their balance sheet, consolidated by The Currency from the 2020 accounts of the 73 British subsidiaries controlled by the family. (No consolidated accounts are published, with most UK subsidiaries owned through a holding company in Guernesey).

The UK companies owned a combined £316 million in property assets and owed £207 million in debt raised directly from banks or alternative lenders. Their own equity came to less than £5 million in total and the difference was financed by intercompany debt owed to offshore group companies. This £100 million was funnelled through a Luxembourg company called Galveston Investments SA, which we will meet again in Ireland.

This all tells us that the Comers’ historic British portfolio is now a steady business and probably provides a healthy rent roll from numerous mature properties (each vehicle is small enough to be exempt from publishing a profit and loss account, so we have no sight of that). However, it provides a limited asset base from which to sell or raise debt to fuel expansion in Ireland on the scale that we have seen in recent years.

*****

In the first decade of this century, Germany – more specifically Berlin and the eastern part of the country – became the Comer brothers’ new Eldorado. Ian Kehoe previously wrote about a 2013 whistle-stop tour of the German portfolio with Luke Snr that ended up taking two days.

It is difficult to assess the value of that side of the business today. German property records are not publicly accessible. The jewel in the Comer’s German crown – the Berlin office tower Die Pyramide, which is home to their HQ in the country – is owned by Prunash Ltd, a Gibraltar subsidiary of Comer Group International Ltd, itself registered in the British Virgin Islands. Limited financial information available from Prunash shows that it had €20.8 million worth of tangible assets at the end of 2018. It is impossible to ascertain how much of this accounts for the value of Die Pyramide.

What is clear is that the Comer Group’s German portfolio has lost some of its lustre. For one thing, a number of its properties suffer from a high vacancy rate. The group’s property management arm in the country, Comer Immobilienmanagement, is currently advertising 22,000sqm of office space immediately available for rent in Die Pyramide itself – that’s nearly half the building. 

Another example is a group of properties in Meuro, a small town next to Europe’s only American-style speedway motor racing track in eastern Germany. The Comer Group owns two hotels there, both empty and looking for tenants. An apartment complex adjacent to one of them also has homes available for rent.

On the other side of the country, near Frankfurt, the Comers were landlords to a 7,000sqm supermarket in Lampertheim but the business shut down last year. Local politicians have organised public meetings with US-headquartered property group Scannell Properties, which has previously developed distribution centres for Amazon in Germany and is now considering plans for the site. A spokeswoman for Scannell told The Currency: “Unfortunately, we cannot provide any comment on the site at Lampertheim.”

Comer Immobilienmanagement has dozens more shops, offices and apartments advertised for rent – a normal feature in any property business, but empty stores account for up to a third of the area at several shopping centres. Typical apartment rents advertised across the portfolio range from €300 to €700 per month.

Last month, local media reported the sale of a Comer-owned shopping centre in Eberswalde near Berlin to local investors, again amid high vacancy. 

This is the latest in a string of disposals that have seen some of the group’s highest-profile urban properties change hands since the mid-2010s. The Frankfurt-listed property group Auroundtown bought the Markt Center retail complex in Potsdam from the Comers in 2015. It now also owns shopping centres previously owned by the Comer Group in Leipzig and Jena, while the Park Arkaden now demolished in Berlin is reported to have transferred to a subsidiary of Aroundtown before its redevelopment.

Meanwhile, the City Tower office block outside Frankfurt, while still offering space for rent through Comer Immobilienmanagement, is now listed as part of another institutional investor’s portfolio, Publity AG. Publity did not respond to The Currency’s questions on the building’s current ownership.

There are now no more than 30 properties publicly linked to the Comer Group in Germany, most of them apartment buildings and local shopping centres in smaller towns in the east of the country. As the Galway brothers slowly retrenched from Germany, however, they were investing back home.

*****

Demolition crews are now hard at work at the Corrib Great Southern Hotel in east Galway city. This is the final outrage inflicted on the building, which has been idle for over a decade and suffered various forms of vandalism. Activity started only after Galway City Council placed a charge on the property in March in recognition of levies due under derelict sites legislation.

Filings show that companies controlled by the Comer and McHale families bought the vacant property in 2013 for a total acquisition cost of €3.8 million. The Comer vehicle in the deal, Trigo Property Company Ltd, last year booked €7 million for its half share of the site, suggesting a €14 million valuation.

The shell of the abandoned Corrib Great Southern Hotel in Galway.

This may be what the owners hope to fetch by selling the property as a cleared development site. In the meantime, however, it illustrates the highly speculative nature of the Comers’ fast-growing Irish wealth. Their portfolio in this country was largely bought cheaply in the years following the financial crisis, when they and US funds were among the rare solvent buyers willing to look at fire sales conducted here by so many of their bust competitors.

In 2019, the Comer Group conducted a fresh valuation of that portfolio and updated the balance sheets of its 80 Irish special-purpose vehicles, adding €397 million to assets previously valued at €810 million. As they closed their 2020 accounts with full knowledge of the Covid-19 pandemic, a small number of subsidiaries reversed part of those gains. 

Sansovino Property Company Ltd, which owns the Tallaght Cross East mixed development, was one of them. “The directors have revalued the investment properties on an existing use basis at €150,000,000 at the year end. This has resulted in a reduction in value in the current period of €25,000,000. The directors have reduced the value of the property due to the concerns regarding the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the future rental income and the effect this has had on the open market value of the property,” directors Barry and Luke Comer Jnr reported. This, however, remains the group’s single most valuable asset.

Papyrus Property Company Ltd, the owner of the Milners’ Square apartments in Santry, booked another €20 million write-down. In both cases, this was less than half the gains reported one year earlier. Finally, Fusaichi Ltd, which owns the Abhainn na mBradan Centre in Newtownsmith, Co Galway, erased half of the €8 million increase in value booked in 2019.

This leaves the Comers’ Irish property portfolio with a total valuation of €1.2 billion. Until 2019, much like the UK side of the business, the Comer Group did not hold any equity in Ireland. The value of its properties was cancelled out by liabilities owed to related companies controlled by the family offshore. Now the net €319 million in fair value gains reported in the past two years sit in in Irish companies.

This does not tell us the full story, however. To understand the real worth of the Comers’ Irish property empire, we need to explore how it was assembled and financed through three different structures. Click on the image below to explore them and see the valuations of individual Irish properties reported by each group subsidiary.

Click on the image to download the full map.

Going it alone with Galveston

On July 14, 2011, a receiver appointed by Anglo Irish Bank to the collapsed business of developer John Fleming reported receiving €850,000 from a company called “Dante Property”. This would turn out to be the Comer Group’s acquisition of the Sentinel, a half-built multi-storey building in Sandyford. 

Today, the empty concrete shell on the edge of the fast-developing south Dublin business district remains a visible symbol of the collapse of the Celtic Tiger. What has changed is that Dante Property Company Ltd now values it at €4.5 million. Part of this jump in value is due to planning permission obtained in 2017 for the building’s completion as 294 “office suites” – small self-contained units each capable of accommodating a small number of remote or self-employed workers. 

The company, however, has not got any richer. Its liabilities have steadily risen in proportion to the valuation of the Sentinel. In June 2020, it was in fact in negative equity because of a €5.7 million debt owed to Galveston Investments SA. This is not because that related company has advanced funding to develop the site: Dante has not yet started any works and it has no cash. Instead, there is an apparent arrangement to return any gains made on the property to Galveston under the form of intercompany debt.

The Comers established Galveston Investments SA in Luxembourg in 2006 as a subsidiary of Comer Group International Ltd, the British Virgin Islands holding company we previously encountered in the UK. Luke Comer Snr is a director of Galveston.

Galveston is a major offshore routing hub for Comer money. According to its latest accounts to the end of 2018, it had extended €410 million in loans to Irish companies; €137 million to UK companies; € 8.3 million to Unbridled Co. Ltd (a short-lived attempt by the Comers to establish their own tax-transparent debt vehicle under Section 110 of the Irish tax code); and €7 million in other loans. 

Galveston was, in turn, mostly funded by €511 million in loans it received from Comer Consulting in Monaco. Comer Consulting was once identified in a rare detailed financial filing in the UK as “a partnership based in Monaco, of which Mr L. Comer, a director of the company, is a partner”. The British company that made this disclosure in 2008 was Ridgeland Properties Ltd, a vehicle for the development of the New Southgate office park in London where the Comer Group has its international headquarters. Ridgeland also reported paying Comer Consulting £8.7 million over two years for “services” rendered at the time. 

This information closes the loop. A share of past profits that surfaced in Luke Snr’s Monaco home, including in the form of consulting fees, has now been recycled into Irish property through intercompany loans distributed via Galveston in Luxembourg. When Irish subsidiaries realise the growing value of their assets, they will be in a position to return those gains to Monaco up the same chain in the form of profit-participating debt repayments. 

There is no evidence that any external lenders are involved in the funding distributed through Galveston. The Luxembourg company does not report significant sources of capital outside Comer Consulting and no bank has registered any charges against the companies or properties it has financed. Unless some mysterious backers supply them with vast amounts of unsecured finance behind the scenes in Monaco, this is the Comers’ own money.

We don’t know how much of it they poured into Ireland because many of their acquisitions took place prior to 2018, before EU legislation forced Irish unlimited companies to publish their accounts if they were held through limited structures. What we can see is how much the Comers now own through this Galveston-funded structure, which brings together Irish subsidiaries held through another British Virgin Islands company, Real Palm Resources Inc.

This unleveraged model covers 65 Irish vehicles with €567 million worth of property now on their books. In turn, they owe €481 million to Galveston.

When the 63 houses in the Glendale ghost estate in Tullow, Co Carlow were famously auctioned off for €10,000 each in 2012, the bargain buyer turned out to be Nimbus Property Company, a Galveston-funded Comer company that now books a €7.8 million valuation for the property after completing it and planning a second phase on adjacent land.

The Comer Group used the same structure to acquire some trophy properties at crashed prices, such as the Palmerstown House Estate now acting as its Irish headquarters outside Leixlip, Co Kildare. This is also one of the four hotels run directly by the group’s Irish hospitality branch, CP Leisure, which posted growing losses of nearly €1 million as the pandemic hit last year despite shedding 80 of its 280 employees.

The other three are the Glashaus in the Tallaght Cross East complex, the Ellison in Castlebar, Co Mayo and the Shearwater in Ballinasloe. Arrogate Ltd, the vehicle that bought the Shearwater hotel’s underlying property in 2018 for €8.6 million, now values it at €14 million.

Another hotel project, the unfinished Kilternan leisure centre and its vast surrounding land straddling the Dublin-Wicklow border, similarly entered the Comer portfolio through a fire sale in 2014 and first appeared as a €6.6 million asset in the accounts of its owner, Nijinsky Property Company Ltd, for 2017. Despite planning difficulties surrounding the Comers’ plans to redevelop it as an equine excellence centre, it now appears as a €45 million asset on Nijinksy’s balance sheet following a phenomenal €35.1 million revaluation in 2019.

To complete the picture of Irish Comer hotel properties self-funded through Galveston, the Comer group now places a €5.5 million valuation on the Shannon Oaks Hotel and Country Club, which it acquired after it closed down following a fire in 2011. The property’s owner, Comer vehicle Dalakhani Ltd, obtained planning permission to renovate the property last year.

Luke Comer

Luke Comer Snr on one of his stud farms in Co Wicklow. Photo: Bryan Meade

Horses for courses

Much has been written about the Comers’ ambition to become leading racehorse breeders and their debatable success in this area, which is best left to the experts. 

From a business perspective, their main equine venture is Seattle Slew Ltd, a subsidiary dedicated to “the operation of stud farms for the breeding of horses. The company also generates rental income from letting out farm houses at the stud farms.” Luke Comer Snr’s own Brookville Racing business in Dunboyne, which employs 24 people, primarily trades through Seattle Slew.

The bloodstock business had €2.3 million worth of stocks on its balance sheet last year, assumed to be racehorses. By contrast, its land bank is much more valuable, with €28.8 million worth of property assets on its books.

Seattle Slew has been a money pit for the Comers, posting a €7.6 million net loss last year alone. It now sits on €13.5 million in accumulated losses but is not at any immediate risk of collapsing: All its liabilities are towards other Comer group companies. 

Another Comer subsidiary, Sainfoin Property Company, spent Galveston money in 2014 on a 200-acre site strategically sandwiched between Dublin Airport and the M50. Dubbed Metro Park, the property contains the planned location for a future metro station. The Comer Group lobbied Fingal Country Council in 2016 to remove the prohibition on residential development in the noisiest zone immediately around the airport and specifically designate an area outside the metro station as suitable to build homes. The council ignored those demands in its development plan published the following year. The €38.2 million valuation booked by Sainfoin for the site depends on both the metro being built and a degree of rezoning being achieved. It remains to be seen if or when either will happen.

More recently, the Galveston self-funding model has continued to serve the acquisition of multiple Galway sites such as the Rosshill Rd SHD site described at the start of this article, the office building now redeveloped as One Galway Central and anchored by tenant PwC in the city, or the Bun na Coille housing estate in Moycullen bought by a Comer vehicle after collapsed local developer McInerney Homes had built just a handful of 113 permitted homes before falling into insolvency.

One of the fastest jumps in value recorded by a Comer property has been that of Ivy Hall in Dunshaughlin, Co Meath. Purchased in 2016 or 2017 with Galveston money for no more than €2.5 million, the residential and commercial complex had a book value of more than €15 million last year after successive revaluations. Its owner Alysheba Ltd added another €3.8 million through additional property acquisitions.

The Shamrock loan: Leveraging Deutsche Bank 

While the Comers used Galveston to self-fund many cheap but high-risk bets, from the Metro Park gamble to rural ghost estates, their experience in the UK and Germany had shown that they had remained afloat through the financial crisis and presented a credible borrowing profile. 

In 2013, property agents Savills were lining up the Gemini portfolio for sale. The three properties, put on the market by Ulster Bank-appointed receivers to various borrowers, covered 640 rental apartments and over 18,000sqm of retail space in Dublin and Cork. Island Key, near the IFSC, and Orchard Gardens in Cork city each had around 150 apartments, while the much larger Tallaght Cross East development came with most of the commercial space and the 48-bed vacant Glashaus hotel.

Despite significant vacancies, the shopping areas were anchored by Marks & Spencer in Tallaght and Tesco Express in Cork. Overall, the portfolio had a rent roll of €5.6 million per annum. 

The Comers were widely reported at the time to have closed the deal for €75 million. What is less commonly known is that the transaction offered them an opportunity to secure bank debt for the first time in this country. 

Not only did Deutsche Bank offer them finance for the Gemini portfolio, the German lender also refinanced 12 similar city and or commuter belt rental properties the Comer Group had recently snapped up in the initial phase of its Irish acquisition blitz. The table below shows the deals backed by Deutsche and their value in the eyes of the bank on the occasion of an independent valuation by CBRE in August 2014, totalling €148.7 million.

Under the debt facility, dubbed the Shamrock loan, Deutsche initially advanced €89 million on December 6, 2013. The following year, on the basis of the CBRE valuation, the bank reported: “There was a second funding of €20.0 million in September 2014 to allow the sponsor to continue their opportunistic investments in Ireland while at the same time remaining at similar leverage levels as the portfolio market value increased by €38.4 million predominantly driven by the stabilized performance of the assets.”

From Frankfurt to Tallaght via the Bahamas

Even by multinational standards, the corporate (and tax) structure of the Shamrock loan is a convoluted one. When Deutsche Bank began to lend to the Comer Group, it advanced the funds to Duridgebay SA, an offshore vehicle established for that purpose in the Bahamas. 

The loan attracted interest at the benchmark Euribor three-month rate plus 4.05 per cent and was due to mature in January 2019. This was significantly more expensive than finance Deutsche provided in Ireland to Kennedy Wilson at a premium of 2.75 per cent or to Johnny Ronan and Paddy McKillen at Euribor+3 per cent in 2014 and 2015 respectively.

Duridgebay has in turn been making loans to Antara Investments SA, a Luxembourg  Comer company where the funds are mixed with the family’s own contribution channelled from their central financing house, Galveston Investments. 

Antara’s latest available accounts, to the end of 2017, show that it had received €145.8 million in funding from Duridgebay and €10 million from Galveston. In turn, it had lent the combined €155.8 million to Irish companies for investment in property here.

This suggests that Deutsche Bank extended far more than the 2013 initial €89 million Shamrock loan in the years that followed. 

This information is available now because the Shamrock loan was among the first tranches of Irish debt Deutsche sold on through a securitisation issue on the Irish Stock Exchange in 2015 – once it became possible to offer Irish property-backed debt to investors again after the financial crisis. The prospectus that detailed the back story of the Shamrock loan at the time included two other debt packages offered for securitisation: A €57.4 million loan made to Kennedy Wilson for the development of Central Park in Leopardstown; and €39.9 million borrowed by Johnny Ronan and Paddy McKillen against Dublin's Treasury Building.

These three debt files had no other connections than being securitised away by Deutsche Bank at the same time, but they illustrate the type of company the Comers were in in the eyes of investors.

The 2015 securitisation was not a fire sale – more like a normal recycling of capital by the bank, albeit a risky one at a time when international markets remained spooked by the property-induced crash of Ireland’s financial system a few years earlier.

On that occasion, Deutsche provided some insider information on the running of the Irish business: “Comer Property Management in Ireland (“CPM”) was established to ensure that a formal management platform is actively managing the properties across the Comer Group portfolio. Currently the office is staffed by five individuals led by Barry Comer. There are three further property managers who collectively deal with the day to day activities across the Irish portfolio. CPM currently has 8 full time maintenance employees who jointly oversee the properties with additional employees engaged to deal with Galway and Cork assets,” the bank explained at the time.

The best proof that Deutsche was happy to continue lending to the Comers is that the bank has since refinanced the group companies it had backed with the initial Shamrock loan. Fresh charges registered by the same Irish vehicles in 2016 and again in 2018 show continued support from the German lender.

Not only that, but Deutsche Bank and the Comers were about to do business together again – this time with a third partner.

Families in business: The western joint ventures

As detailed above, the derelict Corrib Great Southern Hotel was a joint purchase between the Comer and McHale families – of McHale farm machinery fame, with the co-founder of the Ballinrobe, Co Mayo engineering business Padraic McHale a 50 per cent investor in the property alongside his family.

While the Comers and McHales bought the Corrib hotel site for a song and have not spent much on it since, it was another story in Ballsbridge, where they successfully bid for the site of UCD’s former veterinary college in 2013. The purchase price was reportedly €22.5 million at the time, and the first accounts filed by Weltara properties, the McHale company that owned half of the site, indicated that their share of all acquisition costs came to €16.7 million after one year in business. 

This was within the two families’ own financial reach, but when it came to developing the site as the high-spec mixed apartment and office complex now known as Number One Ballsbridge, they needed backing.

In 2016, Deutsche Bank stepped in again. To this day, Weltara and Tulyar Property Company Ltd, the Comer company that owns the other half of the project, have each owed €40 million to the German bank. 

The borrowings have allowed them to develop the project, for which they now book different valuations. The Comer’s half appears as a €108.4 million asset on Tulyar’s latest balance sheet, while Weltara returns a more conservative figure of €73.3 million.

Number One Ballsbridge.

The Comer Group owns another property with huge potential in partnership with the McHales – the Odeon site covering much of the eastern side of Eyre Square in central Galway. In a similar fashion to the Ballsbridge project, they have self-funded the acquisition,  which currently appears as a €7.9 million asset in the Comers’ books and a €9.5 million one on the McHale side.

They have left existing buildings around the Odeon House office block in their existing state for now, but the major redevelopment they have touted for the area would again require them to raise significant finance.

To complete the picture, the Comers own another property in Galway city in a joint venture with a local business family: the Nox (former Ibis) hotel on the Headford road, in which hotelier Diane Burke and her family hold a 50 per cent stake. The building, now valued at €11 million, was acquired with funding from Ulster Bank, to whom €1.5 million remained due last year.

This is the only trace of the Comers borrowing any money from an Irish bank to finance their expansion in this country so far.

Branching into wind turbines?

Tagalie Property Company Ltd is unusual among Comer companies in that the main asset on its books is a vast plot of isolated mountain land in Bellacorig, Co Mayo with zero residential or commercial property development potential.

It is, however, surrounded by wind farms.

As of April of this year, Barry Comer is also the director of Limerick-based Tornado Wind Power, a newly formed company intending to produce electricity in which he owns a 50 per cent stake alongside Nicola O’Neill and Michael Hynes.

O’Neill and Hynes have separately formed a string of companies in the renewable energy area in recent months.

*****

For the past decade, the Comer Group has followed a simple rule to build up its Irish portfolio: Buy them cheap. This was easy at first, when nearly every other player in the industry was bust and the Comers had only a handful of fearless American investors to compete with. 

This approach has led to the quick accumulation of a massive Irish portfolio. Those properties that were in running order have continued to provide homes and commercial space for families and businesses, and some that were near completion, such as the Glendale ghost estate, have come back to life. The high-profile One Ballsbridge property and a handful of other developments have been completed from scratch. 

The neighbours of other Comer-owned sites, from the Sentinel building to the Shannon Oaks hotel, have not been so lucky. With too many assets to develop in one go, the Galway brothers have sat on derelict sites that have attracted complaints ranging from anti-social behaviour to land hoarding. Instead of selling some assets to invest in others, they have held on to nearly everything – only the Connacht Hotel in Galway, the Beckett office building leased to Facebook in Dublin's East Wall and the Leinster Arms pub in Co Kildare have been sold.

With the Irish residential market now back at pre-crisis levels, the strategy of snapping up distressed properties at bargain prices is difficult to sustain. Yet there is no sign that the Comer Group is backing away from acquisitions in the country. In the past four years, group companies have bought warehouses adjacent to the Comer-owned Island Key apartments in central Dublin; a 45-hectare site in Hynestown, in north Co Dublin; a 10ha infill property already surrounded by housing estates on the outskirts of Tullamore, Co Offaly just last year; and two sites in Cork city’s south docklands, which is the place to be according to news headlines this week.

As O’Callaghan Properties unveiled plans for a €350 million development in the area on Wednesday, just around the corner, Tiznow Property Company, a Comer vehicle, was awaiting the outcome of a consultation with An Bord Pleanála on a potential SHD application for 191 apartments on the former Cork Warehouse Company site. Tiznow also has another consultation open with the planning board for a much larger, 1,030-apartment complex on the neighbouring former Tedcastles site, with feedback due next month.

And, unlike the UK and Germany where the Comer Group’s corporate activity has stalled, Ireland has seen the family establish three new property vehicles this year alone. Aristides, Azra and Giacomo Property Company have yet to report what they are up to. At this point, all we know is that they are named after American thoroughbred winners.

Further reading

Ugandan intrigue: the €250m project, the Comer brothers and the 1,750 homeless families