Daft Property - Irish Property News

Homeowners' guide to calculating and paying the new tax... From next week 1.9 million homeowners will start getting letters from the Revenue outlining how they are to pay a new local property tax which is to replace the household charge that was introduced two budgets ago. Property tax? But I paid a fortune in stamp duty when I bought my house at the height of the boom. Surely I can’t owe more money on a property that is now worth half of what I paid for it? Yes you can. The Government, has decided to ignore the massive amounts of money it collected from us in property-related stamp duty over the last decade or so and start on a blank page when it comes to property tax. The good news (for the Government) is that it should raise €500 million a year from the new tax. How much will this one cost me?  Well it depends on where you live, but the good news is that the majority of people will be expected to pay less than €500 a year thanks to the all but total collapse of th

THE taxman will use GPS-style technology to help work out your property tax bill. Sophisticated aerial mapping will be used to measure a home's proximity to shops, transport links, schools and other amenities that have a bearing on a property's value. A 'deprivation index' will also be used to measure the affluence or poverty of an area, which will also have a bearing on the value and the amount of tax that should be paid. Homeowners will receive letters in the coming weeks telling them how much the Revenue thinks their home is worth and the tax band the property falls into. The revelations show the hi-tech lengths the Revenue is going to in order to clamp down on those who knowingly undervalue their home for the new charge. It is employing a sophisticated database which calculates a property's location in relation to facilities that increase its value. Aerial maps and GPS-style systems will measure "the distance from each property to a series of

Fall in house prices second-highest in EU... Irish house prices fell at the second-fastest rate in the European Union last year and at a rate that was almost five times faster than the EU average, according to data compiled by academics based at the National University of Ireland in Maynooth (NUIM). The figures published by the university’s All-Island Research Observatory show that Irish property prices are now nearly 30 per cent below a standardised average dating back to the middle of 2010. They indicate that the Republic has had the worst-performing property market in the EU over the last six years , although markets in Spain and Bulgaria have performed almost as badly in recent years. The data does contain some glimmers of hope that a recovery may be in sight or at least that the worst of the price falls are over. The figures, compiled from Eurostat price surveys, show the Republic reporting the third-highest quarterly property increases in the third quarter of last ye

200,000 homes may need to be bulldozed -- bank AN explosive report has claimed that Ireland has so many empty houses that it would take up to 43 years to fill them all. Deutsche Bank figures suggest that there are 289,451 empty houses in Ireland, including almost 60,000 vacant holiday homes. This represents a vacancy rate of 15 per cent. As the Deutsche Bank map shows, the empty properties are highly concentrated around the Atlantic coast with Kerry and Donegal particularly badly afflicted. This glut of empty homes will have a major impact on future property prices. "Demand for housing is the key factor as to how long it will take for this oversupply to be reduced, and aside from demand for second homes the key driver should be population growth," Deutsche Bank notes. Based on 2011 figures which showed population growth of just 13,000, and the average number of residents per house, the bank estimates that it could take until 2055 for the glut of houses to be worked through

House prices drop 1.8% in October... Dublin: House prices fell the most in six months in October, extending a real-estate slump that has pushed prices to their lowest in six years. Prices dropped 1.8% from the previous month, the most since April, Dublin-based Irish Life & Permanent Plc said in a monthly report today. From a year earlier, prices dropped 13.9%. House prices have fallen in every month since March 2007 and are now 27% below their peak in the early part of that year, according to the Irish Life/ESRI index. The average price of a house in Ireland was €228,347, the lowest since October 2003. Report - Irish Examiner.

Cute hoor/fast buck gene to be removed from national herd... The Greens have done a complete about-turn and embraced genetic modification on a grand scale THE GREENS have embraced the concept of genetic modification, and with remarkable results. That’s a turn-up for the books. The party doesn’t do things by half measure. Their conversion isn’t down to some namby-pamby tinkering on the fringes of the allotment, or attempts to grow a pig from quorn. John Gormley, Eamon Ryan and their ecologically motivated Frankensteins have only gone and engineered a change to the basic genetic make-up of the Irish people. Using a secret procedure (which has been fully approved by their frightened partners in Government because they fear an agonising political death if they don’t), the party has succeeded in removing the cute hoor/fast buck gene from the national herd. “We’ve actually taken away that whole speculative impulse,” Eamon Ryan announced at a press conference yesterday. Thanks to new legislat