Onate, a specialist property bridging lender, has signed a new €75 million funding deal with Citi that it says broadens its access to institutional funding that it can funnel towards projects in Ireland.
The company, which has been doing business in the State since 2021, said its earlier €50 million facility with NatWest has been fully repaid as part of the transaction.
The funding arrangement with Citi follows the extension of Onate’s senior facility with Triple Point, the company said in a statement, and complements its €100 million Vienna-listed secured note programme.
The nonbank lender, which employs 18 people across the Republic, provides debt funding to developers and property investors to complete projects, including refurbishments of existing properties, that are not yet generating income.
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Dan Gandesha, cofounder and chief executive of Onate, said the projects it funds tend to be “tired” assets, sometimes in a state of dereliction, or ones “currently in a different use category” that are being repurposed as residential.
“Generally speaking, when we’re providing funding, we’re funding a deal that does fit into, say, Bank of Ireland’s traditional boxes right, but with a level of repositioning, it can,” he told The Irish Times.
Mr Gandesha, who moved from the UK to Kilkenny in 2018, declined to give specific examples of projects Onate has been involved in, stating that he did not want to identify the borrowers.
However, he said the firm had funded projects involving the repurposing of Georgian and Victorian-era properties.
“Often you walk around Dublin, you’ll see them in Mountjoy Square and elsewhere,” he said. “Beautiful buildings, but some of them are very tired and not fit for purpose, for modern rental stock.
“That would be a typical example where we would fund the purchase of these tired but fantastic buildings with a local investor who will refurbish the properties and then put tenants in there and make them fit for modern renting.”
He said: “As you walk around Dublin, whenever you see work being performed on these sorts of buildings, there’s a decent chance that we’ve funded those sorts of properties.”
Onate has also introduced a bridge-to-term loan, providing borrowers with “longer term stabilised loans” and complementing its existing bridge loan product, he said.
Mr Gandesha said the deal with Citi was a “milestone” for Onate, which shows it is an “institutional grade active lender”.
The firm says it has provided more than €210 million across more than 300 loans since entering the Irish market in 2021.
Onate entered the Spanish market last year, opening an office in Madrid.
