Daft Property - Irish Property News

First-time buyers are still not tempted by cheaper houses... HOUSES are now more affordable than they have been in a generation -- but few first-time buyers are tempted to buy, new figures show. House prices have fallen so sharply that it takes just more than 12pc of an average first-time-buyer couple's income to repay a mortgage, the EBS/DMK housing-affordability index shows. But despite the continuing drop in affordability, the number of new buyers jumping on the property ladder is a fraction of the level it was during the housing boom. National average house prices are still falling and are predicted to drop below €140,000 over the next year. A major reason for the lack of demand in the housing market is the continuing falls in rents. Another set of figures released by Daft.ie yesterday showed that rents fell again in the past few months, as there is a glut of rental properties. The latest housing-affordability index found that the average first-time house-buyer couple are payin...

It's time to quiz planners for their part in the crash , says ISABEL MORTON AS THE next few rounds of the blame game get going, including the banking enquiry, one wonders when our 88 different planning authorities and more importantly, our planning appeals board (An Bord Pleanála), will get much more than a sharp slap on the wrist for their part in the property fiasco which resulted in some 300,000 homes lying empty. No doubt individual planning authorities, much like the banks and the developers, were only interested in what was going on in their own back yard, but one would have to wonder how and why An Bord Pleanála upheld permission for so much of what was built during the Tiger days. An Bord Pleanála’s mission statement is “to play our part as an independent body in ensuring that physical development and major infrastructure projects in Ireland respect the principles of sustainable development and are planned in an efficient, fair and open manner”. Surely, as an independent bo...

Uncertainty over jobs after record market fall... AS grave uncertainty hangs over the future of thousands of jobs at Irish branches of recession-slammed US firms, markets are not expected to rebound quickly from yesterday’s record-breaking fall. At home, the ISEQ index of Irish shares’ closing figure was its lowest for more than five years. Across Europe, the trend was similarly dismal for a second day, with the FTSE Eurofirst 300 index falling 2.6% to its worst close since May 2005. The stock market shock waves followed the collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers, the 158-year-old fourth largest financial institution in the US. In response, central banks around the globe pumped funds into the money markets, including €70bn from the European Central Bank, $50bn (€70.5bn) from the US Federal Reserve and £20bn (€25.2bn) from the Bank of England. Lehman’s bankruptcy filing, the biggest in US history, followed Merrill Lynch & Co’s decision at the weekend to sell itself to Bank of A...

The fundamentals of the Irish housing market point to more sharp falls over the next two to three years... WITH HOUSE prices falling fast and likely, come the autumn, to fall even faster, no sane person would currently even think of buying a house. But this immediately raises the question of how long the crash will last. In other words, how long will it be before you can buy a house and not regret the decision for the rest of your life? Looking at past collapses in house prices abroad, we can see that they fall into two broad groups. In the first group, that includes Japan and Switzerland, prices suffered a long, slow decline of a few per cent a year for a decade. The second group, that includes the Netherlands and Finland, saw real prices halve in three to four years, and then fall gently for a few more years. If this second pattern repeats in Ireland, given that we are already one year into the crash, we can expect two to three more years of sharp falls. After that, prices should sta...