Daft Property - Irish Property News

HOME buyers get mortgage approval from either Bank of Ireland, Permanent TSB or EBS. The buyers then find a property they want that is part of the NAMA scheme. They will need a deposit of at least 10pc of the value of the property. If they are buying a €200,000 house, this means the buyer will need a deposit of €20,000. So the house hunter borrows €180,000 from the bank and repays the mortgage based on this amount for five years. The scheme works by NAMA deferring 20pc of the value of the property, which works out at €40,000 in this case. But for the first five years the homeowner makes payments on the full €180,000 they have borrowed. If, after five years, when the property is revalued under the scheme, the property value has fallen, then the homeowner will end up not having to pay the full amount of the mortgage. This is because NAMA has deferred up to 20pc of the property purchase price. If the property falls in value by 20pc, then the €40,000 will be written off by NAMA. If it fal...

Blow for homeowners as BoI to hike mortgage rate... BANK of Ireland will today reveal that it is increasing mortgage rates for thousands of hard-pressed homeowners. The move comes despite the European Central Bank (ECB) leaving its rates unchanged yesterday -- for the 11th month in a row. Homeowners who are vulnerable to rising mortgage rates are now being warned that they have seven days to act. Experts are advising new buyers -- as well as those who are coming off a fixed rate or are on a standard-variable rate -- that they should lock in now. Bank of Ireland (BoI) and its subsidiary, ICS -- which between them have one in four mortgages in the country -- are to announce that they are increasing their standard-variable rates for existing customers by 0.5pc. They are also raising fixed rates by up to 0.7pc for existing customers who want to fix, the Irish Independent has learned. The change in the standard-variable rates will add €80 a month to the repayments of someone on a €300,000 m...

Thousands at risk of rate hikes as AIB bars mortgage switchers... THOUSANDS of homeowners are effectively trapped with their existing lenders after the biggest bank in the country, AIB, admitted yesterday that it no longer accepts mortgage switchers. Just two lenders will now accept switchers, leaving thousands of homeowners trapped and vulnerable to being hit with higher mortgage rates. The AIB move is a huge blow to mortgage holders who are with Permanent TSB as it has increased its mortgage rates twice in the past six months, and those with Halifax, which is closing its retail operations here. AIB has the lowest home-loan rates in the market, with a standard variable rate of as low as 2.25pc and a three-year fixed rate of 3.19pc. In comparison, Bank of Scotland (Ireland)/Halifax has a three-year fixed rate of 7.25pc. Permanent TSB shocked homeowners this month when it pushed up its standard variable rate for existing customers by 0.5pc. Other lenders are now expected to follow the m...

Home repossessions will soar as 6,400 are in arrears... AN avalanche of repossessions is now expected after new figures show close to 6,400 people stopped paying their mortgages more than a year ago. The number who have failed to pay their mortgages for a period of 12 months or more is three times the level it was at a year ago. These homeowners are now almost certain to have their homes repossessed. Pressure And struggling homeowners face renewed pressure from next month, which will be the first time Bank of Ireland and AIB will be able to begin new legal proceedings against homeowners who have failed to pay their mortgage for a year. A moratorium agreed with the Government forced the banks to wait a year before starting legal action to repossess homes from those who failed to pay their mortgages. Many of the 6,400 people at dire risk of losing their homes should not have been given their mortgages as they had no hope of repaying them, mortgage experts said. These bad lending decision...

Average house prices are now back at January 2004 levels - report... AVERAGE HOUSE prices in Ireland are now back at the level seen in January 2004, according to the latest ESRI/Permanent TSB house price index. Prices fell by 1.5 per cent in August, according to the data released yesterday, bringing the decline in the past year to 13 per cent. According to the survey, house prices have now been falling for two full years and are 24.4 per cent lower than at their peak in February 2007. Niall O’Grady, general manager of business strategy at Permanent TSB, said the rate of decline had been more dramatic during the summer due to the low levels of activity in the market and a lack of confidence in any recovery this year. “Recently, prices have started to fall faster in the Dublin region due to the high level of surplus stock available,” he said. House prices in Dublin have fallen by 18 per cent over the past year, compared with a 12 per cent decline for property outside the capital, the sur...

Nama will bankrupt us for generations... The Government isn't just passing bad laws, it's putting us all in an economic strait-jacket.. . First, it's necessary to use this space to defend the banks. Over the past week, much of the criticism thrown at senior bankers was unmerited, and it would be unfair not to acknowledge that. It's a dirty job, defending those greedy bastards, but someone's got to do it. I can promise that normal service will be resumed shortly (within a few paragraphs, to be honest -- at which point we'll try to understand why we're now up to our chins in the rising tide of faeces that is Nama). The bankers got a bad rap because one bank, Permanent TSB ("The Bank That Likes to Say Feck Off"), increased interest rates. Other banks acknowledged they have similar intentions. Screams of horror issued from the media and politicians. Oh, dear -- it seems the banks are refusing to operate as social utilities. As though they believe that ...

THE average price of a house in Ireland is now €70,000 less than at the peak of the property boom, according to new figures. Dublin and commuter belt homeowners have been particularly badly hit by the ongoing downturn in house prices. The latest Permanent tsb/ESRI monthly figures on house sales show the average price of a house nationally in June was just over €240,000. This is down from €311,000 in February 2007 when the market peaked. In Dublin, the average price of a home is now just under €320,000. This is a drop of over 15pc on the same time last year, considerably worse than the 10pc average fall outside of the capital. It is expected that the trend will continue for the immediate future, said a spokesperson for Permanent TSB. "The index today confirms the pattern of recent months. Poor demand and significant oversupply have combined to cancel out the benefits of lower interest rates to mean that prices continue to weaken. This pattern is likely to persist for some time,...

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...

The latest house price figures, which show prices falling by 0.5pc in November, seriously underestimate the true extent by which prices have fallen. And there is almost certainly more bad news to come in the New Year. Every month, mortgage bank Permanent TSB publishes its index of house prices. The index, which is compiled by the ESRI and has shown a decline in house prices for every month since March 2007, is generally regarded as being the most authoritative and up-to-date source of information on the state of the Irish housing market. foolproof Unfortunately, the Permo numbers are not foolproof. They are based on completed house prices during the month. With huge stocks of unsold new and second-hand houses on the market, and up to 18-months supply at current levels of demand by some estimates, sales are taking much longer to close than they used to. What this means is that the Permo numbers reflect sales that were agreed four, five or six months ago, as far back as last May or June,...

140,000 homeowners 'have fallen into negative equity'... Jim Power, chief economist with Friends First, said: "I reckon the majority of first-time buyers who bought into the market over the last three years are in negative equity." Analysing the gains made up to the peak of the housing boom, and the losses since, Mr Power said negative equity was affecting "at least 140,000 people and that's rising by the day". He warned that, in terms of the recession, "we haven't seen anything yet" and predicted the numbers in negative equity could reach 200,000 by the end of 2009. Latest Census figures show there were 570,000 residential mortgage holders in 2006, with tens of thousands of new mortgages taken out since. So the continuing decline in house prices means that one in three mortgage holders are likely find themselves trapped in a home worth less than the loan they took out to pay for it. With €125bn owed on Irish mortgages, homeowners facing r...

Latest figures confirm the "softening" in house prices and according to a report from the Irish Independent... " HOUSE prices fell by 9pc in the past year, wiping €27,500 off the value of the average home. National house prices fell by 0.7pc in March, according to yesterday's Permanent TSB/ERSI house price index. But the price decline for first-time buyer houses was greater, at 10pc, as potential buyers have been squeezed hard by banks hiking up interest rates for new customers. A 10pc drop in First-Time Buyer (FTB) house prices will see some 40,000 new buyers go into negative equity by the end of the year, according to Davy Stockbrokers. Negative equity is when the value of the mortgage is greater than the value of the home. Economists also warned that prices will have to fall further if first time buyers are to be enticed back into the market. New buyers have also been hit by the withdrawal of 100pc mortgages, and the need to find deposits of up to 10pc. Over a th...