Daft Property - Irish Property News

We're being seduced by property porn again – will we ever learn? LAST week the "glossy brigade" was out in force. Papers were full of bright, impossibly blue skies, over "imposing" homes many of which "boasted" this feature or that attribute. Yes, the glossy brigade, Ireland's property pornographers, who pedal lifestyle fetishes to the middle classes are back at a newspaper close to you. Amazingly, just six years after a property crash, which destroyed much of the economy, chatter about house prices appears to be back, or at least, out of social quarantine. Any day soon, expect a new TV programme on house hunting, the joys of home makeovers or the allure of trading up. Why do we allow ourselves to be taken in by this nonsense? Every spring since the crash, the estate agents and the property industry have tried to re-launch the property market with puff pieces, hard selling and gimmicks. Yet underneath the hype, the evidence from the hous...

Another year over, what do we know? Five years on from the crash, what have we learned? There is no magic solution but we are still thinking like an island. In the end, not even sex could sell Belmayne. Nearly six years ago the north Dublin estate seared itself in the nation’s memory, with images of couples cavorting on kitchen counters, all in the desperate hope of arousing interest in an increasingly flaccid property market. At the now infamous launch party, the developer of Belmayne, Donal Caulfield, wearing a diamante-studded Roberto Cavalli beanie, promised buyers “gorgeous living” in four-bedroom houses with curved walls, all for €600,000.  (Below: one of the famous “gorgeous living” ads) The “gorgeous living” hoardings are long gone, as are the prices. No-nonsense signs on the Malahide Road now advertise houses in Belmayne starting from €245,000. Belmayne is just one attraction in north Dublin’s property market Ground Zero. In 10 minutes you can drive from t...

Struggling families flock to care centre for meals... ENTIRE families are going to homeless centres for their dinner every evening. Before the recession, the Capuchin Day Centre for the homeless in Dublin would rarely have seen children coming through its doors -- but now up to 10 families a day are coming coming in to get fed. Many of the families are struggling to pay large mortgages taken out during the boom. They are worried about losing their homes and literally do not have enough money to put bread on the table, says Brother Kevin Crowley, who runs the shelter. He says that there are four times the amount of people arriving today compared with a few years ago. Some of those now seeking help are professionals such as engineers and architects who would have been earning a very good wage during the boom years. "It's not just homeless people who come to us, its anyone who is in need. We are getting lots of families with children coming in," he says. "...

Full employment to bust in four years... IT took just four years for the country to go from full employment to a situation where one-in-seven people is out of work. As recently as 2007 unemployment stood at just 4.6pc -- less than one in 20 of the workforce. That has trebled to 14.6pc today. It may come as a shock to Celtic Tiger cubs, but you only have to go back to 1994 to find a similar proportion of people out of work. Back then, the unemployment rate had been bobbing around 14pc for over a decade -- down only slightly from its peak of 17pc in the mid-1980s. The difference between then and now is that a staggering 440,000 people are signing on for the dole today. Even at its worst in 1993 there were fewer than 300,000 people on the Live Register. Then came the boom and for over a decade Ireland became a Mecca for jobseekers, both international workers and its own returning emigrants who pushed the workforce to a once unthinkable 2.1 million people. Dole queues fell to...

Once among the richest people in Europe, the Irish have been laid low by a banking collapse and the euro zone’s debt crisis. What now? “THERE’S a craze for land everywhere!” The line draws wry laughs from audiences in Dublin’s Olympia Theatre at a revival of “The Field”, John B. Keane’s play about a land dispute in south-west Ireland. Their country has been transformed since the play was first staged 45 years ago. But Mr Keane’s lines also belong to a more recent time in Irish history. Consider St Michael’s Green, an abandoned half-built housing estate near the village of Lixnaw, in north Kerry. “Look at what’s coming soon to Lixnaw”, proclaims a sign at the entrance. Visitors who take up the offer are met with an apocalyptic sight. Four finished houses, complete with driveways, stand in line. Windows are broken; shards of glass are strewn on the ground. Peer (carefully) through the window-frames and you can see doors hanging from hinges and semi-carpeted floors. Opposite the house...

Emigration set to hit one-in-four city households... POLL: Quarter of young people want to leave. MORE than one in four Dublin households will experience emigration within the next 12 months. The scourge of forced emigration has yet to peak, a new poll of over 1,000 people has found. A major brain-drain is on the horizon as 23pc of young people aged 18-24 say that they intend to leave Ireland by early 2012. An analysis of the Millward Brown Lansdowne poll for the Herald shows that the exodus will include tradesmen, college graduates and other newly unemployed young people. Almost one in ten (9pc) people interviewed said they personally intend to emigrate within the year. And 20pc said another member of their household planned to move away to places like Australia, Canada or the US. More men than woman are ready to move overseas but those leaving are spread across all social classes. Around one in six are unemployed while one in eight are self-employed. The poll found ...

Bailout will sink Ireland before we can even swim... Foreign banks and creditors should lose everything they gambled on the likes of Anglo, but instead, they have been saved by the taxpayer Make no mistake about it, this 'bailout' will sink Ireland. We are witnessing a monumental struggle between the innocent average Irish person and the guilty creditors of the bust Irish banks. Interestingly, the financial markets have seen through what the Government and the elite are trying to do and have reacted with ferocious negativity to the Irish deal. The markets realise that the Irish State is not bust; rather the Irish banking system is bust. Therefore, rational people can see that any deal which is framed to give Ireland a chance has to sever the link between the bust banks and the solvent State. However, far from severing the link, the deal solders the link between State and banks, making the Irish Republic itself little more than a bust bank. The rest of the world has twigged that...

Mansergh concedes that serious mistakes were made... THE IRISH public is determined to remain in control of its own affairs despite the scale of the financial crisis, Minister of State Martin Mansergh told leading economists in London last night. “There is a determination to try and maintain control as far as we can in our affairs, and to avoid – and to do whatever we have to do to avoid – outside dictation either on expenditure or taxation.” Speaking to Politeia, an economic forum in London, Mr Mansergh readily conceded that serious mistakes had been made by governments over the last decades. In the late 1990s, public spending controls were eased up, with the number of public employees rising by 50 per cent and the salaries for those in higher ranks by 80 to 100 per cent, sometimes even more. “I think there is an argument for saying that Irish society, or certainly the upper echelons – whether involved in the public or private sector – did become somewhat greedy when the good times we...

Ireland faces a tough road to economic recovery... LIMERICK , Ireland – Hard times. You took out a second mortgage to fix up the house. Then in 2008, Ireland's housing bubble burst. A year later, Dell Inc. closed its Limerick laptop factory, putting you and 2,000 others out of work. You're 58 and unemployed, and your home is financially underwater. Gerry Hinchy is fighting with Dell and his bank for better terms. But he knows the manufacturing work and the property boom are gone. "It won't come back. They can turn the screw in China for 50 cents an hour," he said. "What's done is done. The question now is how to get out of it." To overcome a decade of debt-driven growth, Ireland is gutting its way through one of the world's toughest austerity efforts. Economists here say Americans eventually will face the same belt-tightening to reduce the debts of government, businesses and consumers. The Irish say they could not wait. As one of 16 countries usi...

The property bubble floats once again on the Fringe of 'Liffeytown' ONE OF the more esoteric events of the Absolut Fringe Festival will be artist Fergal McCarthy’s Liffeytown . From September 12th to 26th, 11 temporary red and green structures will be floating in the River Liffey, between the Ha’penny Bridge and O’Connell Bridge. If they look familiar to you, that’s because at some time you’ve probably played with tiny versions of the Monopoly houses and hotels they resemble. McCarthy got the idea from the “craziness of the development and lack of planning at the height of the boom, when apartment blocks were being built all over the city, particularly in the Liberties, where I was living at the time. It was a time of disposable architecture, with no vision or longevity,” he says. It was also a time during which it seemed as if the planners, if they could have built on water, would have done so. Now McCarthy is planning to do just that, with his river-based installation. “The L...

Department says it warned of property bubble... THE DEPARTMENT of Finance says it warned the Government from 2005 onwards about the dangers of a property bubble, internal official documents show. Briefing material prepared for the department’s secretary general Kevin Cardiff last month states that the department warned over several years that the “over-emphasis on construction left the economy vulnerable to macroeconomic shocks”. It also defends the department’s performance in failing to forecast the extent of the downturn, and points to similar failures by institutions such as the ESRI, Central Bank and the private sector to predict the magnitude of the slowdown. The material was prepared for the secretary general ahead of his appearance before the Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee just over a month ago. The contents of the documents have been released under the Freedom of Information Act in the same week Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan announced an external review of the depart...

Is it time to start thinking the unthinkable? If our membership of the eurozone was the cause of our woes, perhaps leaving the club would help fix things... AS the Greek financial crisis continues to worsen and shows signs of spreading to other eurozone countries, is it time to start thinking the unthinkable? With Portugal and Spain now in the firing line, we in Ireland need to start asking the hard questions about both our exchange rate policy and our debt mountain. On Tuesday, Finance Minister Brian Lenihan was quoted as saying that leaving the euro would be a "disaster" for Ireland. "Were a country to contemplate leaving the euro there would a flight of capital and a collapse of the banking system", according to Mr Lenihan. While we have no reason to doubt the minister's sincerity, the fact that he is even discussing the issue, even if only to rubbish the possibility of Ireland exiting the single currency, demonstrates that the worsening of the Greek crisis h...

IRELAND TODAY: IT’S JUST over a year since Wall Street and its Irish cheerleaders chanted “We are where we are” while Main Street reeled. Since then, every wrong-headed, populist Government economic policy, every catastrophic failure of the Financial Regulator, every rampantly greedy, short-termist instinct of the financial institutions and builders/developers has been exposed... A year ago, commentators were predicting something akin to the end of capitalism as we know it. Citizens were demanding humility, apologies, accountability, a purpose of amendment, radical reform, fewer tax breaks, an end to the bonus culture and a fairer share-out of the tax burden. So how is your head now, a year on? Still looking for other heads on plates? There is a lot to rage against. Only this week, headlines announced that banks are being “forced” to pay bonuses. But how long can a people sustain a condition of mass, impotent rage while remaining relatively sane and healthy? A few weeks ago, 1,200 peop...

Life for the boom's dead spaces... The Irish landscape is scarred with the remnants of failed or unfinished building schemes from the Celtic Tiger years. GEMMA TIPTON asks some leading architects to use their imaginations and suggest ways to put them to some use. EVEN DURING THE boom, it was difficult to see some of the things we were building and imagine them as a success. Enormous luxury golf and spa hotels in the middle of nowhere, shoe-box apartment blocks in small towns, ghost estates where no houses were ever sold , and massive out-of-town retail and industrial parks – all these have blighted the landscape, and now stand in various stages of construction or dereliction, mocking us with the question: what should we do with them? Some ways out of such waste have already been proposed: turning the hotels into nursing homes is one example. Or we could look to SoHo in New York, where inner-city factories and warehouses became, first, artists’ studios and then ultra-desirable loft ...