Skip to main content

Demolotion The Only Way...

Demolition the only way to build a better future...


WITH THE building frenzy of the last decade and a half, who would have thought that we would be thinking of knocking some of it down again? But Brendan McDonagh, chief executive of Nama, probably got it right when he talked about the need to demolish some of the surplus stock in out-of-the-way locations.

Everyone now knows that some of these estates will never be lived in, because they are not within easy commuting distance of jobs, or because there simply was never a market for them in the first place. It wasn’t just the bankers and the developers who got it wrong. The planners in the various local authorities have also made grave errors in allowing many of these estates to be developed in one horse towns and obscure villages.

These developments – many of them large executive-style homes – simply did not make sense, even in buoyant times. Some of them are now an eyesore, and could disappear even faster than it took to build them.

The same should apply to swathes of seaside developments in places like Lahinch, Achill, Bettystown and Courtown, where many of the owners can’t afford the luxury of a second home and can’t sell them on either. So much for the tax breaks that applied to these schemes in the early part of the boom. Now that they have run out for the most part, the mortgages still have to be paid monthly. Another daft idea of the era.

Don’t expect to see the wrecker’s ball out just yet. Like everything else in Nama, it takes months to formulate a policy and it is likely to be at least Christmas before the the demo men appear.


Report - Irish Independent

Popular posts from this blog

Ireland's Celtic Tiger Excesses...

'Bang twins' may never get to run a business again... POST-boom Ireland is awash with cautionary tales of Celtic Tiger excesses, as a rattle around the carcasses of fallen property developers and entrepreneurs will show. Few can compete with the so-called Bang twins for youth, glamour and tasteful extravagance. Simon and Christian Stokes, the 35-year-old identical twins behind Bang Cafe and exclusive private members club, Residence, saw their entire business go bust with debts of €9m, €3m of which is owed to the tax man. The debt may be in the ha'penny place compared with the eye-watering billions owed by some of their former customers. But their fall has been arguably steeper and more damning than some of the country's richest tycoons. Last week, further humiliation was heaped on them with revelations that even as their businesses were going under, the twins spent €146,000 of company money in 18 months on designer shopping sprees, five star holidays and sumptu...

Property Crash Homes For Sale...

Hundreds of repossessed homes in Ireland to be sold by auction... UK property consultancy Allsop to hold auction in April at Dublin's Shelbourne hotel: Flats in Ireland that could have fetched €150,000 in the Celtic Tiger years are to be put on the market for as little as €25,000 (£21,000) in the country's first ever mass auction of repossessed homes. And, in a sign of how wide the property crash is, the latest item to turn up in liquidation sales in Dublin is a job lot of 15 cranes, including a pair towering over Anglo Irish Bank's half-built headquarters in the city's docklands. "Tower cranes were among the most sought-after heavy plant and machinery 10 years ago," Ricky Wilson of Wilsons Auctions says. "You couldn't buy them quick enough. Now they are left idle for two or three years on sites." He has 15 cranes worth €500,000 going on sale on 26 March, with German, Dutch and Polish buyers expressing interest. But it is the auction ...

Property Ireland - Irish Land Values Go Up Like A Rocket & Fall Like A Stone...

Land values go up like a rocket and fall like a stone... SITE EVALUATION: Why would a developer bid €225,000 an acre in 1999 and €2.8m an acre in 2007? Bill Nowlan explains WHY HAS THE value of development land fallen so precipitously, by over 50 per cent in the past 12 months, when residential and other property values have only fallen by 25 per cent or 30 per cent? There is an old property cliché which says that "land values go up like a rocket and fall like a stone" and this seems to have been bourne out in Ireland over recent years. Why does this happen? To answer this question requires an insight into the way developers prepare their bids for development land and I set out below a glimpse into that process. Let me start by looking at how a developer in normal times estimates his bid for a plot of land with planning permission, which in estate agents' parlance is ready-to-go. The key starting point in a developers equations is the expected sale price of the finished b...