Daft Property - Irish Property News

Just eight houses sold under the hammer in Dublin this year, as the number of houses offered at auction collapsed by 80 per cent. In total,19 properties were offered for sale in the capital’s auction room; in 2006, at the height of the boom, more than 1,000 properties were auctioned in the city. Estate agents Bennetts held most of this year’s auctions, putting five properties under the hammer. Lisney handled four auctions, as did Sherry FitzGerald, while Colliers Jackson-Stops auctioned three. Douglas Newman Good, Harper O’Grady and Property Team each held one auction. Simon Ensor, director of auctions at Sherry FitzGerald, described the number of auctions this year as unprecedented. ‘‘In the past, a quiet year for us would have been one where we [Sherry FitzGerald] held 25 auctions and where overall, there were around 100 across the entire market," he said. ‘‘I’ve been selling houses by auction since the mid-1980s, and I don’t ever remember a year where there were so few sales.&q

Price of homes 'to fall 23pc in two years'... HOUSE prices here will fall by 13pc this year and a further 10pc in 2010, international credit ratings agency Standard & Poor's has predicted. After suffering the sharpest price fall in Europe in the four years to 2010, Standard & Poor's (S&P) expects Irish prices to stabilise in 2011. However, some Irish estate agents believe that much of these price fall predictions are already priced into current Irish house prices following a spate of house-price cuts by builders since the start of the year. S&P is using the Permanent TSB (PTSB) house price index as its guide and this has been criticised by many estate agents, including Michael Grehan of Sherry FitzGerald and Keith Lowe of Douglas Newman Good, for being too late with its price trend calculations. These agents reckon that Irish prices have fallen by between 35pc and 40pc from their 2007 peak but the PTSB index, because of the way it is calculated, has so f

Falling prices represent new reality... At the end of last year, estate agents and vendors alike were reeling from the price drops that the market had experienced during 2007. But although they were shell-shocked, many industry experts were predicting that the rate at which prices were dropping would slow during 2008, and that prices would stabilise. Twelvemonths on, that now seems like nothing more than wishful thinking. The banking crisis, soaring unemployment and extremely poor consumer confidence have all resulted in the market having one of its worst years in living memory, a fact underlined last week by a survey which found that 80 per cent of estate agents were selling less than three properties a month. Even those potential buyers who are interested in buying are finding funding increasingly difficult to source, although observers are hopeful that the European Central Bank’s (ECB) policy of aggressive rate cuts will go some way towards alleviating that problem. With asking pric