Daft Property - Irish Property News

The next Allsop Space Auction will take place on 1st March 2012... Venue: The Shelbourne Hotel Dublin 2 Online Catalogue: Lot     Type     Location     Reserve Price will not exceed this figure 1    Investment Flat    Dublin 1    €135,000 2    Investment Flat    Dublin 8    €120,000 3    Investment Leasehold House    Galway City    €75,000 4    Investment Flat    Dublin 8    €90,000 5    Vacant Freehold House    Drogheda    €100,000 6    Vacant Freehold House    Enniscrone    €55,000 7    Vacant Freehold House    Dingle    €50,000 8    Investment Flat    Dublin 1    €175,000 9 ...

We're surrounded by empty houses - so why did council give go-ahead for even more homes? RESIDENTS in an area of north Dublin awash with empty homes are objecting to plans to build even more new properties. Homeowners in Brackenwood, Balbriggan, Co Dublin, say there is no need for a new development of 18 units, since they are already flanked by empty homes in surrounding estates. The developers, Parkway Partnership, were last week granted planning permission for the units, which will be located adjacent to Brackenwood, after they modified their original application. CRAMMED But local resident Rose Allen said: "We don't need any more houses. Who has the money to buy houses now? "Now we have a developer coming in who wants to build 18 houses and it's the only green that we have in our estate. They're all going to be crammed in because the site is no bigger than a football pitch. "It's in our own green area. We've no field, no trees in ...

New-house completions at lowest since 1970s... HOUSE completions are to fall to their lowest level since records began in the 1970s. The number of new homes expected to be finished next year will be 10,000, whereas even during the recession-hit 1980s the lowest number of completions was 15,654 in 1988. A gloomy economic forecast from the Department of the Environment says it will be another two years before we see a return to economic growth. And it says that the estimated 150,000 unsold homes currently on the market will discourage new building activity for the next four years. The Construction Industry Outlook 2009-2011, conducted by DKM Economic Consultants for the department, finds that the current downturn in the industry is the most severe on record and that the number employed in the industry could fall to just 138,000 by the end of the year. This is half the number employed in 2006 at the height of the boom when 267,000 people worked in construction. New figures from the Depart...

Builders? You can afford them now... JUST WHEN the construction industry thought the news couldn’t get any worse, it suddenly did. Several reports published this week have painted a bleak picture for an industry already on its knees after the property sector meltdown ... They indicate that prices for big and small construction jobs have fallen almost as dramatically as jobless numbers in the sector have risen. Although homeowners will have sympathy for individual tradesmen who have lost their jobs, they will relish the consequential price drops and the sudden availability of tilers, plumbers and carpenters who could not be got for love nor ridiculous sums of money at the height of the boom. “Builders were making money hand over fist for years and even at a 30 per cent discount they are still making money and don’t let anyone tell you any different,” one industry source unsympathetic to the plight of builders told The Irish Times this week. The Construction Industry Federation stoutly r...

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...

Building a case for survival without a solid foundation... IN a certain fairytale, a vain emperor struts through the streets showing off his "new clothes". The adoring crowd applauds the naked emperor until a small child cries out: "But he has nothing on!" Yesterday, Judge Peter Kelly, head of the Commercial Court, gave short shrift to developer Liam Carroll's "fanciful" scheme to turn a €1bn-plus loss into a €300m profit in three years. Liam Carroll, a reclusive director of 203 companies, is the developer least likely to exhibit any degree of vanity. But he is naked. He is broke. His companies are insolvent. Not only insolvent, but so interconnected in a "byzantine" corporate structure that if one company falls, the empire does too. Carroll knows this. The Government knows this. Carroll's benign lenders, who are rolling up his interest with "great forbearance", know this. These are the same banks, incidentally, who are hammerin...

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 ...

Ireland plans drastic cuts to prevent debt crisis... Ireland is to demand pay cuts for civil servants and public employees to prevent the budget deficit soaring to 12pc of gross domestic product by next year – becoming the first country in the eurozone to resort to 1930s-style wage deflation to claw back competitiveness. "We will take whatever decisions are necessary," said premier Brian Cowen. The Taoiseach yesterday denied reports that he invoked the spectre of the International Monetary Fund to terrify the trade unions into submission. But the threat – uttered or not – has been picked up nevertheless by labour leaders. "The IMF's normal prescription in such situations involves mass dismissals and pay cuts, along with cuts in pensions," said Dan Murphy, head of the public service union, who accepts the need for draconian retrenchment. The budget deficit will soar to 9.6pc of GDP this year as property tax revenues collapse. It is so far above the EU's Maast...

The grand house of cards comes tumbling down... The engine of the economic boom came grinding to a halt this year, but optimists hope the housing collapse is near bottom... MAYBE, JUST maybe, people will look back on 2008 as the year in which they should have bought property. A few years from now, when the economic gloom has lifted, today's prices - down as much as 40 per cent from the peak of 2006 - might seem like so many missed opportunities for first-time buyers and trader-uppers. If that sounds like something that a property journalist would say, then consider Warren Buffet's oft-quoted advice to investors: "Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful." Right now, people in the Irish property market are very fearful. A combination of tumbling prices, banks refusing to lend and fast-eroding job security has created an atmosphere in which people are afraid to commit to buying even a sofa, never mind a home. "It's carnage out th...

It's less middle of the road, more end of the road as the reality of the recession sets in with mid-income families who'd become used to mochas, Maseratis and Manolo Blahniks, writes Justine McCarthy You've probably heard most of the blood-curdling stories by now. There's that one about the corporate wide boys dumping their flash unpaid-for cars in the airport car park before hopping on the emigrant Airbus. And the one about crèches haemorrhaging toddlers as their highflying parents stagger to the dole office clutching their P45s. Or the one about builders offering free Lamborghinis and villas in the sun in a last-chance-saloon effort to flog three-bed new-builds in commuter-land. Or the mother 'n' father of all the doomsday tales: the one about the once mega-rich tycoon spending his last million hiring bodyguards to protect him from his angry creditors. You've probably heard them, and thought: Sure, and pigs fly. Perhaps it comes from a defiant optimism ro...

Building sector to lose 40,000 jobs next year... Many leaving to seek work in the Middle East. THE Irish economy is dead on its feet and as many as 40,000 construction workers could lose their jobs next year as housing starts have slumped to pre-1993 levels, according to latest figures obtained by the Sunday Independent. So bad are things here that a number of leading Irish building companies are leading an exodus of our most skilled and talented workers to foreign lands in the search for work. It has emerged that Irish firms are now lining up work in places like Dubai and Iran, both of which are experiencing building booms. In what is further bad news for the Irish economy, the number of housing completions this year will be just 45,000 compared to the 93,000 at its peak two years ago, and next year it is reckoned that the number of completions will be less than 20,000. This year, not one county in Ireland has managed to match or better the number of housing starts last year. In a sh...

The 210 apartments in the nine-storey Gasworks building, in Ringsend near Landstown - Dublin 4, have been vacant since they went on sale two years ago. Developer Liam Carroll has since got the OK to convert the Gasworks apartments into a 520-bed hotel. However local residents are saying "no" to the plans and have appealed the proposal. Their main concern seems to be they will have to pay for the upkeep of common areas - hotel guests will not etc. The original promotion of the apartments, 2 years ago, by Hooke & Mac Donald mentioned: ...One of the most interesting and significant residential projects ever to be carried out in Dublin was launched on the market... A familiar feature of the South Dublin skylinehas been transformed. The striking metal cylinder of the former gasholder at Barrow Street creates a frame within which a stunning new nine storey block of large two bedroom apartments has been built. The curves of the building complemented by its dramatic glass fa...

I see in the Irish Independent today an item concerning a favourite, Dublin landmark, of mine... "THEY have featured in numerous postcards and a very famous Guinness ad, but perhaps their most important cameo appearance came when they featured in U2s 'Pride (In The Name Of Love)' video. However, Dublin City Council does not believe the Poolbeg chimneys are iconic enough to place on their Record of Protected Structures. Following a request from Cllr Dermot Lacey (Lab) to have the landmark ESB chimneys placed on the protected record, city councillors heard that city planners had conducted a survey, history and full assessment of the chimneys. They concluded from this that while the Poolbeg chimneys were considered to be of a certain level of architectural, social and historical significance, they were not of sufficient value within the meaning of the Planning and Development Act, 2000. Complex The twin red and white chimney stacks measure 680 feet in height and were construc...

Culture Being Destroyed In Ireland: The struggle to save over 150 ancient sites surrounding the sacred hill of Tara in Ireland continues...Watch the video: