Daft Property - Irish Property News

Rising house prices lift 45,000 out of negative equity... Rising property prices, particularly in Dublin, are lifting thousands of households out of negative equity, according to new research. A study by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) calculated that recovery in house prices last year alone reduced the number of mortgage loans in negative equity by 15 per cent. Based on mortgage data obtained from the Department of the Environment and theIrish Banking Federation, the institute estimated that the total number of mortgage loans in negative equity peaked at 314,000 in late 2012. Coalition can meet deficit target with adjustment of only €200m, says Ibec Property price growth last year – which saw values rise by nearly 16 per cent in Dublin and 6 per cent nationally – reduced this number by approximately 45,000. At this rate, the ESRI is predicting the number of households in negative equity will have fallen by 43 per cent by the end of the year from its...

How the great Irish fairy tale hides the true horror story... Gene Kerrigan's new book presents an alternative view of the economic crisis, suggesting that some people are actually benefiting from austerity policies. We've been subjected to the Big Lie. We are not all in this together, as this extract reveals By now, they can recite the fairy tale in their sleep. Politicians, their media fans, tame economists and hired mouthpieces use the fairy tale to explain what happened. Like all stories, the details can be changed from time to time, but the basic fairy tale about the Celtic Bubble, the crash and the recession is pretty consistent. And it goes like this. Once upon a time, the Irish people threw off the shackles of the past that held us back. We began to work hard, to innovate, to find within us the talents we always had but which had been suppressed or neglected for too long. In the bad old days, you see, the Brits held us back, or perhaps the Catholic Church sti...

Economist reveals appalling vista of bankrupt and beleaguered Republic... THE EURO ZONE debt crisis will be solved “eventually” as it is to Germany’s benefit to remain in the euro, UCD economist Morgan Kelly has said. Delivering the Hubert Butler Lecture at the Kilkenny Arts Festival on Saturday, Kelly predicted very large European Central Bank loans to Ireland, Spain and Italy. Even if the Republic were to receive favourable terms, “deep problems in Ireland remain”, he added. In an hour-long address, Kelly also predicted that Irish debt will approach €250 billion by 2015, €50 billion more than Coalition estimates, and has said there was “no way we can repay that”. He also warned that the losses in the Irish banks would be much greater than predicted, reaching €100 billion rather than the €60 billion estimated. The academic, who has been praised widely for forecasting the depth of the recession, has recently warned of an impending mortgage default crisis and on Saturday descr...

Irish property could still be overvalued by 30 percent... Irish house prices increased by around 330 per cent between 1996 to 2007 – a bubble of impressive scale and duration, but a bubble nonetheless. Plenty of outside observers saw the writing on the wall and said so, but they were overlooked in the Celtic Tiger gold rush. The European Central Bank (ECB), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Financial Times, the Economist and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) all spoke of dire portents early and often. They were ignored. Cheap and easy money arrived in Ireland just as the tiger economy geared up. The country adopted the euro and access to a large pool of low-cost European finance with it. When the bubble burst Ireland's main domestic financial institutions were wiped out and European institutions and the IMF took over the nation's financial affairs. So the question now is has the country reached the end? According to a report i...

I’VE OFTEN referred, half in jest, whole in earnest, to the likelihood that the blame game would get underway and that everyone would start suing everyone else until eventually, the Irish State would have to accept responsibility for the bank crash. And, it looks as if that might happen if the Irish Property Council (IPC) gets its way, as last week it announced its intention to take the Irish State to court. The IPC is an organisation, which represents a broad range of people in the property business, including builders, developers and investors. (And, before you go into hysterics; this organisation represents everyone from the small guy with one little investment property, to the much-hated big-time developers who once owned vast property portfolios.) The IPC’s main bone of contention is that borrowers are the only ones being held responsible for the Irish property crash. Bankers, the financial regulator and the government appear to have got away scot-free, despite the fact that t...

Hard Times You know times are bad when you can overhear elderly ladies on the bus using phrases like “the current budget deficit,” as I did recently, on a pleasant autumn morning in Dublin. You know times are really bad when one of them just about knows the figure: “Oh, God, it’s 30 percent or something.” In fact, the Irish government’s deficit for 2010 hit 32 percent of GDP, more than 10 times the legal maximum for countries in the euro zone. It’s hard to find a parallel to such public excess anywhere in the Western world. The effects of our crisis are everywhere you look. The bus that morning was almost empty. Barely two years ago it would have been packed with Polish and Lithuanian hard hats, dressed in work boots and high-visibility jackets and heading for their construction jobs. Now many of the migrants have gone back home. Construction has halted, and much other work besides. Fine restaurants now offer three-course lunches for just €15. Newspaper lifestyle supplements are fu...

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...

FORMER Taoiseach Bertie Ahern has pointed the finger of blame firmly at the bankers for the country's economic problems in a new RTE series. The TD is interviewed alongside economic heavy hitters former UK chancellor Alistair Darling, Central Bank Governor Patrick Honohan and Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan in the new series Freefall. The programme investigates the banking system failures and the widespread collapse of the property bubble which fuelled the economic recession. Bubble Coinciding with the second anniversary of the controversial Government bank guarantee, the two-part documentary series tells the story of how a huge property bubble, fuelled by the lending practices of the banking system, brought the economy precariously close to the edge. Former Chancellor for the Exchequer in Britain Alistair Darling said Europe must learn from the mistakes and that every part of society should take a portion of the blame. "If we walk away from it, it will happen again and the...

Negative equity hits €43,000 as average debt soars to €130,000... Report paints grim picture of economy... THE collapse in the housing market has left the average household sitting on €43,000 of negative equity. A borrowing frenzy during the boom means Irish households are now nursing debt levels which are the fifth highest in the developed world. The average household owes €230,000 on its mortgage alone, excluding credit card, personal loans and other debts. These figures have emerged from calculations based on a new report on the economy from Goodbody Stockbrokers. Goodbody's Dermot O'Leary estimates that the bursting of the housing bubble has sent house prices down by 40pc from their peak in February 2007. This means the average house in the State is now worth around €187,000. There are 640,000 households with a mortgage, and the average household is sitting on negative equity estimated at €43,000, calculations based on the Goodbody report by the Irish Independent show. The ...

The property bubble was partly fuelled by political and regulatory mistakes, education minister Batt O’Keeffe has admitted. Addressing the Construction Industry Federation (CIF) conference and dinner last Friday night, O’Keeffe said that those in positions of leadership in the construction industry had the ‘‘opportunity to help shape the future of the sector in a way that acknowledges the mistakes of the past’’. He listed those mistakes as ‘‘the failure of the Central Bank and Financial Regulator to properly control lending practices and the failure of the private sector, including developers and bankers, in amassing wealth without adequately considering the longer term implications’’. He also admitted to a ‘‘failure of politicians to curb a culture of one-upmanship and target-driven greed in the banking and property sectors’’. O’Keeffe said that the annual construction industry review and outlook, to be published this week, ‘‘will not make for happy reading’’. It will show that almost...

Vendors still slow to lose belief in the hype... I WANTED to get away from nasty estate agents, houses containing load bearing dank and breathe the pure, fresh air of New York for a few days. The problem is that fresh air exists here like a Green Party first preference vote and the only other option to going outside and choking to death is sucking in a lungful of legionnaire’s disease in the hotel air conditioning system. Worse still, the search for a new home is stalking me at every given turn. America is the home of the property bubble and ensuing credit crunch. This is, if you will, the San Andreas Fault of finance, to our San Francisco. When I mention we’re living 60 miles from work, group therapy ensues, as people mention their own horror stories, of getting up at stupid o’clock and travelling via Neptune to get to work. House prices pop up in otherwise pleasant chit chat – a topic only slightly cruder than making fart jokes in front of the pope – and someone will describe how ho...

Recession: the bad luck of the Irish... It was once hailed as the best place to live in the world. Now it’s in the grip of a terrifying economic storm. Could Ireland be the first euro country to go bust? In Ireland, the biggest funerals take place in the smallest churches. St Mochta’s, on Dublin’s western fringes, is little bigger than a front room. So many mourners turned up for the funeral of Patrick Rocca that they spilt out onto the pavement. Anyone who is anyone in modern Ireland was there, huddled together under a sky the colour of a day-old bruise. Politicians, pop stars, billionaire developers, horsemen and the sporting elite. Even the paparazzi. Rocca would have liked that. The 42-year-old was the self-styled poster boy for the new, resurgent Ireland, with a glamorous wife, private planes and helicopters, and a property business worth, at its peak in 2007, €450m. But one morning in January, he snapped. The first sign that anything was wrong was when neighbours saw him walking ...

House prices now falling faster than ever... HOUSE prices are falling more steeply than ever, as sellers discount heavily to try to secure a sale. Average prices nationally fell by 1.4pc in January, compared to falls of 0.8pc in October, 0.5pc in November and 0.9pc in December, according to the latest Permanent TSB/ESRI house price index. Prices were down by 9.8pc in the 12 months to January, compared to a fall of 9.1pc in the year to December. The average price paid for a house nationally last month was €258,006, down €3,500 on December 2008, and compared with a peak price of €311,078 in January 2007. The price falls have increased in recent months, said Permanent TSB manager of business strategy Niall O'Grady. "The pace of reductions is clearly accelerating due to deepening price discounting in the market in an attempt to clear existing stock," he said. Dublin house prices were worst hit, falling by 1.4pc in January, whereas there was a reduction of 0.6pc for houses out...

Ireland Cuts Spending As Budget Gap Widens... DUBLIN -- I reland's prime minister announced €2 billion ($2.57 billion) in public-spending cuts on Tuesday, saying the country desperately needs to shore up its battered public finances. Also Tuesday, the Polish government approved a contingency plan to trim public spending by 19.7 billion zlotys ($5.65 billion). The budget cuts come even as other countries are boosting spending to juice their economies. Speaking to the Irish parliament, Prime Minister Brian Cowen said the bulk of this year's cuts -- some €1.4 billion -- would come in the form of increased pension levies on public-sector employees. That is effectively a pay cut for those workers. Mr. Cowen also pressed forward with tax increases for higher-income workers and second-home owners. Though countries around the globe are unwrapping stimulus plans, Ireland is in different straits. Tumbling house prices are gutting property-tax receipts, and Ireland is facing a widening b...

Best to ignore the cheerleaders for the property sector... HAPPY new year? Not really. The banks are at death’s door. Unemployment is rocketing. Cuts much more severe than those proposed in the recent budget are inevitable. The recession is deepening, with fears that Ireland is on the verge of a so-called ‘lost decade’ growing increasingly realistic. We’re up the creek. Auctioneers and developers, however, have a different vision for 2009, one where ever more affordable homes will be snapped up by a willing populace. After all, construction firms cannot cut prices further as they are “down to their bottom line” on prices, according to one builder recently. Indeed, those who are “stupidly waiting” for prices to fall further should cop themselves on and realise that prices are bottoming. This stupidity has been disappointing developers for some time now. In August, property tycoon Derek Quinlan noted that first-time buyers must be given the confidence to buy as “negative media comm...

Bubble bubble toil and trouble...

Talking Property... Give them what they want - a bargain... THE TIME has come to swallow your pride and scream from the rooftops. "WE NEED TO SELL - AND URGENTLY" Just as last season's designer garments fail to excite the fashionistas, your home, regardless of how highly it may once have been rated, will not now excite the chattering classes. Why? Because property is no longer considered a fashionable topic of conversation. In fact, it's a topic to be avoided at all costs these days. It is, as they say, a sore subject. However, on the bright side, the property website Daft has noticed a 35 per cent increase in browsers to their internet site this September compared with September 2007. Now, perhaps they are all nervous homeowners, checking daily to see by how much their property has dropped in value. Or perhaps there are a lot of window-shoppers out in cyberspace at the moment. But along with the above mentioned, I suspect that there may also be a number of potential ...