Daft Property - Irish Property News

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,

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