Daft Property - Irish Property News

Ireland’s property boom was the biggest, and our crash the most violent. In a week that brought news of a further drop in house prices, Economics Editor DAN O’BRIEN explains why the market won’t recover any time soon... ‘THE FUNDAMENTALS of the property market are sound, going forward.” This mantra was repeated constantly during the boom by those who believed that no risks were attached to soaring property prices. If any reminder was needed of how badly wrong this view was, it came this week with new official figures showing yet another fall in residential property prices in August. This, according to statisticians, brought the total decline since the property-price peak, in late 2007, to more than 43 per cent, one of the biggest drops in the world. The latest figures from the auctioneer Sherry FitzGerald, also published this week, are worse still, suggesting that average prices are down by a huge 58 per cent since the bubble burst. The belief that property was a one-way bet b...

Euro dream threatens to become nightmare... ANALYSIS: LAST WEEKEND the world’s attention was on Washington DC as America’s politicians peered into the abyss of sovereign default. On Sunday they stepped back. This weekend attention is on Rome and Madrid. Politicians in those two capitals are sliding towards the same abyss. But there is a big difference between the US and the Mediterranean countries. In America, that country’s leaders walked voluntarily to the edge of the chasm for political reasons. They were not beaten to that point by the bond market. Political leaders in Italy and Spain are in an altogether more difficult position. They are being propelled towards the precipice because confidence in their economies is draining away. They are clutching desperately for something to halt the slide. But it appears ever less likely that they can save themselves. With each passing week it seems increasingly clear that Europe is coming to a fork in the road: one route leads to deepe...

NAMA's fire sales show cruel reality... WHEN NAMA put for sale signs on hundreds of the properties in its extensive portfolio last week, it gave a glimpse of the abyss into which the Irish property market has fallen. But it really was no more than that - a mere glimpse into the as yet uncharted depths of a catastrophe that has the potential to devour the country's economy and impose penury on the population. On Thursday, NAMA announced its first set of annual accounts, which showed the ' bad bank' made a loss of €1.18 billion - that's one thousand and eighteen million - last year. The good news though is that it's mostly a 'paper' loss - we might not really be down by that much, it just depends on how the property market fares over the next few years. Given that the value of property in Ireland declined by a massive 2.1 per cent in July alone, there's not much reason to be overly optimistic there though. At the same time as announcing its annua...

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...

A POETICALLY-titled report, A Haunted Landscape: Housing and Ghost Estates in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland , estimated last July that there were more than 620 such estates where over half of all the houses were either empty or unfinished – exceeding 300,000 units in all. Now we are being told by the Department of the Environment, following an on-the-ground survey of over 2,800 developments, that the phenomenon is not quite so widespread. Of the total of 180,000 houses or apartments involved, 77,000 were found to be occupied, 33,000 were completed and vacant, 10,000 were at varying stages of construction and the remaining 60,000 were not started at all; further building plans had obviously been abandoned as the property bubble burst. The photograph in yesterday’s editions of two children playing on a “street” in Co Cork with everything unfinished around them shows that there are are real victims of this “legacy issue”. The degraded environment of such estates, with their unpaved footpaths ...

How do you solve a problem like Clongriffin? The bubble burst leaving the new north Dublin suburb in the lurch. Now designers and architects are figuring out what can be done to create a sense of community... SO WHAT do you do with a place that’s merely a fragment of what was planned? Clongriffin, on the north fringe of Dublin, was supposed to have a population of 30,000 to 40,000, with all the communal facilities they would need. But construction ground to a halt when the bubble burst, leaving the area’s residents high and dry. Enter Designing Dublin, a unique initiative by Design 21st Century, founded by Jean Byrne and Jim Dunne, who are both members of the Crafts Council of Ireland with backgrounds in business. Dunne was inspired by an exhibition at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art about how design could address current challenges. They brought in Vannesa Ahuactzin, a young American architect who did a year’s programme at the Institute Without Boundaries in Toronto, which spe...