Daft Property - Irish Property News

Homes at a discount - but are they still a good buy? 2008 Review: AFFORDABLE HOMES: There are lots of apartments and houses for sale under the Government's Affordable Homes schemes, writes Frances O'Rourke AOIFE MACMAHON had been renting for years when she applied to Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council (DLRCOCO) for an affordable house in November 2005. "The property market was at its peak and my mum urged me to apply. A couple of weeks later I got a letter saying I was number 168 on the list." After that, Aoife - a single 36-year-old media buyer with an income under the €58,000 affordable eligibility threshold - forgot about her application. She was happy to go on renting her apartment near the Luas in Dundrum; she had lived there for over five years but buying "was off the radar - apartments cost from €600,000 up" and anyway she had always dreamed of living near the sea. In January 2007 she got a call from the council. "There was a two-bed unit avai...

..."Does Brian Cowen really know what he is doing? ...The Lisbon Treaty defeat was a fiasco for the government. Not that it matters even a tiny bit in the real world, but in the world of political perceptions and of the neurotic EU, it means everything and Cowen did not have the stature - yet - to tell the EU to cop on. ...Cowen seems to have been unnerved by the Lisbon defeat. He has seemed unsure, vacillating and unsettled since then. His performances over the last few days have been his worst, aided and abetted by Lenihan. ...The announced cuts in public expenditure are risible. Given the constraints that the prevailing hegemony has imposed on our political culture, tax increases of any sort are out of the question. There is no question that the people who made fortunes during the boom years should now bear the burden of a few bad years. Also no question about borrowing, beyond the constraints imposed by the EU. ...So the only way to deal with a sharp fall in tax revenues is to...

Sunday Tribune's Ken Griffin reports today that... ONE OF the country's leading property magazines has become the latest victim of the construction slowdown, having ceased trading due to deteriorating advertising revenues. Publication of 'Irish Property Buyer' was suspended on Wednesday after a last-ditch attempt to save the magazine collapsed. The title was established four years ago by publisher Joan Fitzpatrick and a former senior editor with the 'Irish Times', Don Buckley, at the height of the property boom. At one stage, the monthly title sold over 7,500 copies per issue but this had fallen to nearer 6,000 in recent times. Buckley told the Sunday Tribune the title had been running at a loss since the end of 2007. "The slide began towards the end of 2006. Last year, we pumped our reserves from previous years into the title to maintain its position but things continued tailing off," he said. He said even advertising for over­seas properties, which h...