Daft Property - Irish Property News

The ECB has no love for Ireland and is seeking to punish us. That's why we should tell it where to go... When the new government settles into their new offices in the next few weeks, many many problems await them. None more so than Ireland's by now fractious relationship with Europe and in particular the European Central Bank (ECB). In truth, Ireland's relationship with the ECB has become so dysfunctional that it now verges on abusive, and Ireland is the one being beaten, and beaten hard. Jean Claude Trichet on his €344,000 plus a year salary and his cronies have no love for Ireland at the minute and despite all the talk of it lending us €150bn to keep our banks afloat, any sensible person would know that is out of its own self interest and not out of any great affection for our small little island. The ECB's role in Ireland's financial crisis was by anybody's standard dubious at best, and criminal at worst. During the boom years of 2004 to 2008, the E...

Boomtime buyers bypassed apartments for a suburban semi... IT's a snapshot of home ownership at the end of the property bubble and shows that, for most of us, only a house is a home. New research shows that despite a raft of advertisements encouraging people to buy 'luxury' apartments in 'exclusive' developments during the boom, buyers instead chose the traditional semi-d in the suburbs. The Eurostat housing report 2009, published yesterday, shows that Ireland has the lowest level of flat dwelling in the European Union. Just 3.1pc of the population live in flats or apartments, compared to an EU average of 41.7pc. Given our population of 4.5 million people, it means that just under 140,000 people live in a flat. This is despite more than 130,000 being built between 2000 and 2009 during the property boom. The most popular form of housing is a semi-detached or terrace house -- almost 58pc live in these homes, more than twice the EU average of 23pc. Detached...

Once among the richest people in Europe, the Irish have been laid low by a banking collapse and the euro zone’s debt crisis. What now? “THERE’S a craze for land everywhere!” The line draws wry laughs from audiences in Dublin’s Olympia Theatre at a revival of “The Field”, John B. Keane’s play about a land dispute in south-west Ireland. Their country has been transformed since the play was first staged 45 years ago. But Mr Keane’s lines also belong to a more recent time in Irish history. Consider St Michael’s Green, an abandoned half-built housing estate near the village of Lixnaw, in north Kerry. “Look at what’s coming soon to Lixnaw”, proclaims a sign at the entrance. Visitors who take up the offer are met with an apocalyptic sight. Four finished houses, complete with driveways, stand in line. Windows are broken; shards of glass are strewn on the ground. Peer (carefully) through the window-frames and you can see doors hanging from hinges and semi-carpeted floors. Opposite the house...

You can see them every day at Dublin’s International Airport. Couples locked in teary embraces, damp-eyed mums and dads farewelling sons and daughters. Friends promising to stay in touch. 1000 people are leaving each week, heading to the four corners of the world in search of work and a better life. Many, like electrician Alan Niland and chef Sean Sherry are going to Australia. “Leaving here is a big thing and everyone doesn’t want to go. It’s a last resort really.” ALAN NILAND Irish Electrician Alan‘s heading to Melbourne and the promise of a job with an Irish electrician. Sean Sherry has been unemployed for the first time in a 25 year career and his fruitless job search has dragged on for 12 months. He now has no choice but to leave his girlfriend and her daughter and take up a job offer on a cruise ship operating from Australia. He has to work to service the mortgage on a house that has crashed in value. “I was driving home one day and I just had a panic attack. What will I ...

Emigration set to hit one-in-four city households... POLL: Quarter of young people want to leave. MORE than one in four Dublin households will experience emigration within the next 12 months. The scourge of forced emigration has yet to peak, a new poll of over 1,000 people has found. A major brain-drain is on the horizon as 23pc of young people aged 18-24 say that they intend to leave Ireland by early 2012. An analysis of the Millward Brown Lansdowne poll for the Herald shows that the exodus will include tradesmen, college graduates and other newly unemployed young people. Almost one in ten (9pc) people interviewed said they personally intend to emigrate within the year. And 20pc said another member of their household planned to move away to places like Australia, Canada or the US. More men than woman are ready to move overseas but those leaving are spread across all social classes. Around one in six are unemployed while one in eight are self-employed. The poll found ...

BANKS RISK making people homeless and adding further vacant houses to an already struggling property market if they raise mortgage interest rates too much, Minister of State for Housing Michael Finneran has warned. He has urged a new government to use its influence with the banks to ensure families do not lose their homes as a result of aggressive interest rate increases. “I am appealing to the banks . . . It would be a terrible, unfortunate thing that we have vacant properties all around this country and we created more vacant properties because people were not able to make repayments. That would be a scandal, and should not be allowed,” said Mr Finneran yesterday at the launch of a new service for homeless people. He said many families were now at the “pin of their collar” and there was a certain level at which they would not be able to make repayments on their homes. He said the number of family homes repossessed in the recession was still very low due to the leniency of the...

Average house prices in Northern Ireland fell by almost 8 per cent last year. The average cost of a house was £149,795 (€178,000), according to a University of Ulster (UU) survey. The number of sales also fell. Cold weather affected activity around Christmas although the market showed signs of stabilising towards the end of the year. One of the UU survey authors, Professor Alastair Adair, said: “The second half of 2010 has been a difficult period for the housing market in Northern Ireland, contrasting with the tentative signs of recovery in the first half of the year. “It seems that the prospects for the UK economy, local fears of public sector cuts and possible contagion effects from the Irish economy may have dented confidence in the local market and that the severe weather conditions may have impacted on sales volumes in the final quarter.” A total of 110 estate agents were surveyed about activity late last year for the UU, Bank of Ireland and Housing Executive Quarterly H...

Grinding despair of negative-equity generation hangs over all our lives... All truth passes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. Arthur Schopenhauer Ireland, 2031. A teenager and his teacher are walking out of an economics class. "My God, what lunacy," says the teen. "I can't believe that the banks were allowed to behave like that." "I know," answers his lecturer. "Imagine, they were able to sell full-recourse mortgages to naive first-time buyers, often way over 100 per cent, without any risk to themselves whatsoever. No wonder they all went mad and pushed money on any poor sod they could." "And then when the crash came, all the big property borrowers and the banks were protected by the Government via Nama and the bank guarantee, while all the small homeowners were screwed?" "Correct, son." "That's not capitalism,...

For sale: the post-bubble rubble. €4,000 or nearest offer... SMALL PRINT: ON TUESDAY, an intriguing notice appeared in the small ads section on the back page of this newspaper. It read: “Arch for sale. This arch was built by artist Emma Houlihan. It was part of a Nama-related art project and built from the reconstituted rubble of a destroyed Leitrim house. Custom built. Perfect for gardens and spaces. Can function as a sculpture or a functional object.” There was a number listed to call, for queries about “cost and shipping”. Emma Houlihan was in Stockholm this week, where a number of interested parties had already called her number, although no solid offers of purchase had so far been made. What is this “arch” she is selling? “It’s a project I undertook while artist-in-residence for the Leitrim Sculpture Centre last summer,” she says. “It struck me that Leitrim was the ghost estate capital of Ireland, and I wanted to make a piece of art connected with that fact. I was mostly i...

Thousands of Irish people who bought homes abroad, for their holidays or as a pension, are selling up – if they can UP TO HALF or more of the Irish people who bought properties abroad during the Celtic Tiger years may now be trying to sell them, according to estimates by estate agents. Their success or failure – and whether they sell at a loss – depends on where they bought and when. “Of the 250 Irish people who bought properties through us between 2003 and 2008 along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, between 50 per cent and 60 per cent are now selling them or have sold them,” according to Kirkor Ajderhanyan, director of Agence 107 Promenade, an agency which specialises in selling properties with sea views on Nice’s seafront. “There were so many of them that we used to call it the Promenade des Irlandais at the time. But most will make an average gain of 25 to 30 per cent,” he claims. On the other hand, Irish agent Hilary Larkin, who sells properties in nearby Cannes, says tha...

Repossessions at all-time high but crisis to deepen... REPOSSESSION orders granted by the courts have risen almost six-fold since the peak of the property boom. Figures released by the Courts Service show that the number of orders granted by the High Court and Circuit Courts for the repossession of lands and premises were at their highest last year, a figure that is set to rise as lenders increase their interest rates. Some 70,000 homeowners are struggling to pay their mortgages, according to Central Bank figures, including up of 40,000 people who have not made a payment for three months or more, and 30,000 who are making interest-only payments. The 70,000 figure includes around 12,000 homeowners who have not made any payments for a year or more. The vast majority of repossession orders granted in the courts are for residential properties, with some 263 of the 306 properties seized by the banks in the Circuit Court last year granted on foot of defaults on home loans. Althou...

WHEN he first began his photographic project documenting the departure of young emigrants in early 2010, David Monahan had no way of knowing a mass exodus was about to take place. But with more than 65,000 emigrating from here last year alone, Mr Monahan’s project, Leaving Dublin, is tapping into the mood of a generation. The Dublin photographer first got the idea when talking to a young couple in their 20s — he was an electrician, she a beautician, and both have been out of work for a long time — who were leaving for Australia. From that one conversation, David decided to begin a series of shots which document emigration in modern Ireland. He advertised to photograph people of all nationalities, who had made the decision to move from Ireland for economic reasons. The pictures, which can be seen on davidmonahan.viewbook.com, are not just random images, but highly stylised and conceptualised shots which will form a series which Monahan hopes to display in a public arena which th...