Daft Property - Irish Property News

Cut-price homes go under the hammer... Up to 1,000 people are expected to attend today’s auction of distressed properties in the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin when some 80 lots, ranging from a Ballsbridge mews to a collection of cut price flats in Portlaoise, will be offered to the highest bidders. The majority of properties are being sold by receivers and include homes in Dublin, Wicklow and Galway as well as small commercial buildings and shops. The lowest priced property is a site in Wicklow town with a reserve of €20,000 while the most expensive is the Dublin 4 mews which is estimated at €600,000. The majority of lots are priced between €35,000 and €150,000 and include flats in the Dublin docklands discounted by over 50 per cent and period homes with large gardens in the Dublin suburbs. The sale is expected to set a new floor for Irish house prices which are widely accepted to have dropped by at least 50 per cent from peak. Today’s prices may indicate an even steeper fall, a

NAMA is now the biggest danger to property prices... If one is to take NAMA planners at their word , a wave of commercial property and development land is set to be unleashed into the Irish market, presumably driving up supply and hammering prices downward . The original idea of NAMA, that it could hoard properties in ways not open to the banks, seems to be subtly changing. Now the agency is talking about developers rapidly reducing their debts via sales of assets and in less than three years. The obvious question arises, who is going to buy all the land banks that are going to be unleashed and what will the unleashing do to prices? One view is -- who cares if prices plunge downward, the market needs to find a price floor at some point. That is all very well, but it is the biggest developers who'll be selling first, the smaller ones will come to the fire sale party late and most likely pay the price, literally. There is also the concern about overspill into the residential market,

First-time buyers are still not tempted by cheaper houses... HOUSES are now more affordable than they have been in a generation -- but few first-time buyers are tempted to buy, new figures show. House prices have fallen so sharply that it takes just more than 12pc of an average first-time-buyer couple's income to repay a mortgage, the EBS/DMK housing-affordability index shows. But despite the continuing drop in affordability, the number of new buyers jumping on the property ladder is a fraction of the level it was during the housing boom. National average house prices are still falling and are predicted to drop below €140,000 over the next year. A major reason for the lack of demand in the housing market is the continuing falls in rents. Another set of figures released by Daft.ie yesterday showed that rents fell again in the past few months, as there is a glut of rental properties. The latest housing-affordability index found that the average first-time house-buyer couple are payin