Economist Morgan Kelly has said there were 11,000 mortgages of over €500,000 taken out between 2006 and 2009, with an estimated value of €9bn.
He said that there were fewer than 2,000 loans over €1m during the period, with total value of €3bn.
The UCD Professor has published a working paper on large Irish mortgages following an Irish Times article he wrote entitled 'Interest-only mortgages depended on a rising market and now many in the small-time landlord sector smell trouble.'
The Professor has said that 'the interest only candy pot was also raided by an estimated 10,000 accountants, lawyers and other professionals who spent between €1m and €2m each on buying homes with a typical loan-to-value mortgage of 80%.'
In his working paper Professor Kelly uses Department of Environment data on the number of mortgages and their size.
While the number of people taking out these mortgages is unknown, the conjecture that the largest 10,000 mortgage borrowers owe around €10bn, largely for buy to let mortgages, does not appear implausible given these results.
He says that more tentatively, an ecological inference procedure suggests that interest-only mortgages went almost exclusively to property investors.
