NEW YORK CITY-Ireland’s 2012 budget, announced last week, contained several potential bright spots for US investors. As the country continues to struggle with debt issues, its banks selling off tranches of loan portfolios for US assets like the Bank of Ireland’s recent $400-million sale of assets to Kennedy Wilson, last week’s developments—specifically the suspension of capital gains tax within certain parameters—could have a significant impact, experts say.

“The budget contains a number of measures which will give greater certainty and greater support to Irish and international investors,” National Asset Management Agency CEO Brendan McDonagh said in a statement. NAMA is the Irish governmental agency formed in 2009 to shepherd the country's banks through the debt crisis.

McDonagh added that a “lack of certainty” on the issue of capital gains tax “was a major concern among investors.”

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Arthur Milston, New York City-based managing director of Savills US, agrees that getting rid of the tax might serve as an incentive for US investors to look at Ireland. “That would certainly be attractive for anybody, anywhere—US or otherwise,” Milston tells GlobeSt.com. “It would be an added benefit of buying there. There are a lot of US investors who have looked over there and would be very interested in buying in a market that’s perceived to be at the real bottom of the cycle.”

The suspension applies for properties purchased up to the end of 2013 that are held for at least seven years.

Milston says that while this might incentivize investors, what’s more likely to have an impact are provisions about upward-only rent increases. Tenants “sign leases that are at a base rent of X dollars,” he says, which then undergo a later review. “In the context of that review, the rent is then adjusted on an upward basis to be consistent with the market.”

If the market has not gone up or it’s gone down, the rent stays the same, Milston explains. Prior to the downturn, rents were growing at huge rates and then the market crashed and then rents crashed. Owners were left with few options, and values were difficult to gauge.

“The issue has been more about the inability to put a real value on anything with the uncertainty of the lease issue being out there,” he says.