Daft Property - Irish Property News

RATHMICHAEL: €2.15M: A LARGE period house set on four acres just off the N11 in Rathmichael, Co Dublin has had its price cut almost 50 per cent Cuilin, on Allies River Road came on the market exactly a year ago priced at €4.15 million. The price has now been dropped to €2.15 million in a bid to sell through joint agents Sherry FitzGerald and Lennox Estates. The 396sq m (4,265sq ft) five-bedroom house has additional space in a coach-house and stables which have been refurbished and now include a games room and office. The grounds have also been restored and landscaped by the current owners who have lived at Cuilin since the late 1990s. A walled garden of just under an acre has also been restored, with traditional divisions and walkways lined with box hedging. The house is elegant and bright with the four large rooms downstairs and a fine curved landing upstairs. The house is located at the end of Allies River Road, well screened from the N11 though you can hear traffic through the trees...

House prices drop to 2002 levels after 14% fall last year... HOUSE PRICES have fallen back to 2002 levels, according to reports released yesterday. The average asking price for a home nationally fell by between 12 and 14 per cent in 2010, according to property reports from websites MyHome.ie, Daft.ie and auctioneers Sherry FitzGerald. All three reports found the rate of decline had slowed, but none predicted that the bottom of the market had yet been reached. However, real estate agents Savills said property in prime locations was unlikely to fall further. Leitrim was the only county in the Republic where property prices did not fall last year, rising by 1.4 per cent in the last three months of 2010. The average home has now dropped by between 35 and 48 per cent since the peak of the property boom, the reports found. MyHome.ie’s latest property barometer found the average home now costs €217,000, over 13 per cent less than this time last year. Sherry FitzGerald put the national price d...

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....

Roll up for the great property giveaway... Agents say an estimated 24% drop in house prices is far too low... There were double-takes all round last Monday when the Permanent tsb /ESRI house price index announced a 24% drop since February 2007 – a figure many believe to be conservative in the extreme. It's difficult to find out exactly what a property sells for as, under the Data Protection Act, publication of selling prices is prohibited and information is therefore based on asking price. Those involved in the business believe a truer estimate of just how far property prices have plummeted is between 40% and 50%. And counting. Ronan O'Driscoll, director of new homes at Savills, points to "the concrete example" of his own home. "I bought it for €1.9m in 2006, but one on the same road sold recently for around €850,000." The new homes landscape has changed radically in ways other than price, he adds, saying that negotiating a deal on a brand-new property is no...

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...

Trophy seaside home tells story of the boom... IF A SINGLE house could tell the story of the property boom then it might be Sorrento Villa on Vico Road in Dalkey, Co Dublin. The Victorian detached house, facing the sea, slumbered up on the hill for decades, its interior divided into two spacious units that would have been described as flats rather than apartments. The house dates from the 1860s when it was built by a provost of Trinity College as a summer villa: and he chose one of the finest sites on the hill with a sunny east-to-south exposure. Two years ago when property prices reached fever pitch, it came on the market with an Advised Minimum Value (AMV) of €4.5 million. However, after intense bidding at auction it sold for €5.6 million. Stamp duty at 9 per cent added an additional €500,000. The new owners went on to spend many thousands more on redecorating the rooms and making changes to the layout, converting it to a five-bedroom house. They also drew up plans to install an expe...

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...