Daft Property - Irish Property News

House prices continue to tumble despite faster selling time... HOUSE prices are continuing to plummet with asking prices now as much as 47pc lower than the peak just four years ago. A new report from property website Daft.ie says that although homes are selling faster, prices are continuing to fall. And the findings are confirmed in a separate report from myhome.ie, albeit with variations in the average asking price for a house. Daft.ie says the average asking price in June was €196,000, down 47pc from the peak. The myhome.ie survey says the average asking price nationally is now €249,000, 40pc down on peak. Prices of new homes are now back at the 2001 level, myhome.ie adds, with average asking prices of €239,000 in Cork, €234,500 in Galway, €185,000 in Limerick, while the Dublin figure is €286,000. Daft.ie said that Dublin asking prices fell by 5.26pc over the past three months, and now the typical figure is half of what it was during the peak in 2007. South County Dub...

Home debt-trap hits 340,000... Massive rise in borrowers caught in negative equity AS many as 340,000 people could now be in negative equity following a sharp fall in house prices. New research which reveals up to a third of a million people owe more on their mortgage than their homes are worth is considerably higher than recent estimates that found 250,000 homeowners were in negative equity. Being in negative equity means you cannot switch mortgages for a better deal, fund a move to a larger home to start a family, or move house to take a job somewhere else. Economist with property website Daft.ie Ronan Lyons has calculated that 340,000 people, or one in five homes, are now in this predicament. "That's 340,000 homes where if the homeowners have to sell, they will not be able to pay the bank back solely through the money they get from selling the house," Mr Lyons said on his blog site (ronanlyons.wordpress.com). The findings are broadly in line with a survey by Amarach ...

Buy my house and get me free - sellers turn to novel ways of enticing customers... 2008 Review: HARD SELL: Want a Lamborghini? A pad in Cape Verde? A wife? These days vendors are getting increasingly desperate, says Paul O'Doherty... SO, IT'S come to this. You're sitting on your stack of blocks that someone in risk management - the irony of it - said would make a great investment five years ago, and now, your Polish long-term tenants have gone home and you can't sell, rent or live in it for love nor money. Or, the bachelor pad has just become a fashion accessory too much - read, I can't afford it - and you're going to move back in with poor Mum and Dad. You can take your pick from any number of examples. Meanwhile, the bank wants to know whether, having missed last month's repayment, you would mind calling in for some financial advice? But how to shift that one-time prime piece of real estate that just won't budge? What you know for certain is that you...

Latest round of cuts as vendors move to sell... Prices are tumbling at all levels of the market as homeowners accept that this is what's needed to tempt buyers ...four with deep price cuts: BAGGOT STREET FROM €5M TO €3.8M NUMBER 72 LOWER Baggot Street was priced at €5 million when it first came to the market in August 2006. Since then this price has been revised down to €3.8 million by selling agent Lisney, a cut of €120,000 or 24 per cent. One of the last inhabited houses on Lower Baggot Street, the four-storey over garden level terraced house has been used as a home and dental practice for many years. The 392sq m (4,200sq ft) of living space includes a self-contained flat in the basement. It is also one of the few houses on that part of Baggot Street to still retain its full garden and mews - a two-storey mews house with three small bedrooms, and rear access onto a laneway. The house was put up for auction back in September 2006, but failed to sell. It has been on the market quie...

50,000 new homes lying empty in 'ghost' estates... AT LEAST 50,000 newly-built homes are lying empty in 'ghost' estates across the country because of the economic downturn. Hard-pressed developers and estate agents are being forced to drop their asking prices by as much as 50pc in a desperate effort to shift unwanted homes dotted across the country. An Irish Independent investigation has also found that hundreds of housing estates which should have been completed at least two years ago are still unfinished. Figures from local authorities show that county councils will not take responsibility for maintaining roads and open spaces in at least 300 estates because they have not been finished to the standard required by the planning permission. The glut of empty homes -- many built under tax break schemes -- shows the pressures now being faced by homebuilders in the economic downturn. Warned House completions are at their lowest level in years and builders are putting off st...

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...

Property prices fall further as Dublin second-hand homes drop by 10.4%... THE AVERAGE cost of a new house was just over 3 per cent lower in the first three months of this year than in the same period last year, according to new figures from the Department of the Environment. Prices of second-hand houses suffered a sharper fall of 5.4 per cent, but the greatest decline was in the price of second-hand houses in Dublin which were 10.4 per cent lower in the first quarter of the year than in the same period of 2007. The price of new houses in the capital fell by 4.8 per cent... The department's housing statistics show a steady increase in the provision of social and affordable housing, but very steep declines in the total numbers of houses built and started in the first three months of the year. Just over 14,000 houses were completed, a decline of 30 per cent on the first quarter of 2007. The number of houses on which construction began was even more dramatically reduced. There were jus...

House building crash helped spark sudden rise in jobless figures... HOUSE building crashed after the Christmas holidays last year, new CSO figures show -- helping to explain the sudden rise in unemployment during 2008. Output in house construction was at the lowest level since the current statistics began in 2000. It was also 20pc less than the previous low point eight years before. House building slumped more than l30pc on the previous quarter, as builders left sites closed after the New Year break. This left the volume of output down 38pc on the same period of 2007. The value of houses built was down 35pc, suggesting little change in prices over the 12 months. Non-residential building was up almost 9pc compared with 2007, and the value of the buildings was 14pc greater. This gain left total construction down almost 22pc on the previous year. But Rossa White, economist at Davy Research, said the figures seemed to be saying that non-house building was already slowing fast in 2007. ...

Changing times for " 21st-century Ireland, where people are looking for ways to reduce both their spending and their negative impact on the environment"... Recycling the good old days... WHAT'S THE STORY WITH WARTIME NOSTALGIA BOOKS? 'Knickers renewed - one good pair from two old pairs; here's how to manage it," begins one snappy article from a collection of pamphlets originally published by the British government during the second World War and which have recently appeared in book form. The trick, apparently, is to cut a new gusset from the back of one pair and neatly sew it into place on the other pair and off you go, good as new. Make Do and Mend contains dozens of original facsimile leaflets offering hundreds of tips on how to make everything from carpets and gloves to saucepans and blinds last a whole lot longer. There are details on how to darn deftly and instructions on how best to convert a tired pair of men's pyjamas into a reinvigorated summer f...

Towns feel pain as jobs vanish... Ireland's towns, once noisy with the sounds of construction, are ominously quiet, as people get to grips with a new reality and the prospect of emigration, writes Ronan McGreevy . A WEEK AFTER Leitrim were knocked out of the Connacht championship by Galway, the county captain, Gary McCloskey, emigrated to London. McCloskey, who was Leitrim player of the year in 2007, had been out of work for five weeks, having been made redundant by Shine Construction, based in Athlone. Shine, which had been involved in several projects in the midlands including the development of Athlone town's new stadium, blamed the downturn in the building sector for its closure in May. The firm had debts of €3.5 million and assets of just €990,000. Twenty others lost their jobs. "I had no work for five weeks," says McCloskey, a Trinity College graduate in civil engineering. "It came to a crunch and that's it - hop on a plane to London. It was easy, given...

Sign of times as Lidl eyes Habitat store... Upmarket furniture store Habitat could be replaced in the city centre by a discount supermarket. German retail giant Lidl is one of only two businesses -- the other an overseas bank -- pitching for the lease of the massive store, located off the bottom of Grafton Street on College Green. Crunch Lidl and fellow discount chain Aldi have seen a significant increase in business since the effects of the credit crunch. They have also been helped by a recent National Consumer Agency survey. The research found that a basket of 28 own-brand goods was more than 50pc cheaper in Lidl than in Tesco or Dunnes Stores. Several leases available on Grafton Street have been slow to sell because of the deterioration in consumer spending. Property adviser CB Richard Ellis has predicted that business premises on the high street will only sell when values have been cut by 50pc. Lidl is not the only big-name trader to have checked out the former Habitat store. Nearb...

..."Does Brian Cowen really know what he is doing? ...The Lisbon Treaty defeat was a fiasco for the government. Not that it matters even a tiny bit in the real world, but in the world of political perceptions and of the neurotic EU, it means everything and Cowen did not have the stature - yet - to tell the EU to cop on. ...Cowen seems to have been unnerved by the Lisbon defeat. He has seemed unsure, vacillating and unsettled since then. His performances over the last few days have been his worst, aided and abetted by Lenihan. ...The announced cuts in public expenditure are risible. Given the constraints that the prevailing hegemony has imposed on our political culture, tax increases of any sort are out of the question. There is no question that the people who made fortunes during the boom years should now bear the burden of a few bad years. Also no question about borrowing, beyond the constraints imposed by the EU. ...So the only way to deal with a sharp fall in tax revenues is to...

"Asking prices on Daft.ie down 8% in past 12 months... The asking prices for houses advertised on Daft.ie have fallen back to the same levels as May 2006, according to the latest figures from the property website. Average asking prices are down almost 8% over the past 12 months, with the sharpest falls recorded in Monaghan, Sligo, Offaly, Louth and Cavan. Daft.ie says it expects prices to fall even further as there is an oversupply of houses in certain areas of the country. However, it says many people, particularly in south Co Dublin, are still posting unrealistic house prices." ... Report from the Belfast Telegraph.

In today's Sunday Buisness Post, Post David Cullen in Belfast reports, on the Property scene in Northern Ireland... "North facing property crisis as house values take a hammering... The deepening crisis in the North’s residential property market is highlighted by figures showing a near 19 per cent slump in values in the year to the end of June. The survey, by Nationwide building society, also showed that prices had dropped by 9 per cent in the second quarter of this year - the steepest correction in property values recorded across Britain and the North. The downturn comes on the back of an unusually sharp jump during 2006 and 2007, when prices grew by almost 80 per cent. ‘‘These increases were clearly not sustainable and left the market particularly vulnerable to external shocks, such as the financial downturn that began last August,” said Fionnuala Earley, chief economist of Nationwide. ‘‘We are now seeing the consequences of that excess vulnerability.” The average price of a...

A New Marketing concept in Ireland called "Recession"... An ad on daft.ie: ..."This is a private sale, so the saving to the Vendor on auctioneers fees is reflected in the price which was orignally offers in excess of 400k prior to the recession!!!" Description: "Summerhill, Carrowmore Lacken, Ballina,Co. Mayo Detached House Excess €370,000 ...dormer home was completed in June 2004 to a very high standard in an area of outstanding natural beauty where planning simply isnt being granted anymore. It has truely wow views out of every window and is within walking distance of pub and beach. The elevated property overlooks the Ross Estuary, Rathfran Abbey, Bartra Island and Killala Bay. Sligo, Enniscrone and the Donegal mountains, together with Nephin Mountain are also to be seen. The rural location is ideal for a large family home or holiday house away from hussle and bussle and yet is less than an hour from Knock Airport. This is a private sale, so the saving to the...

Time for the Summer SALES!... The Sunday Buisness Post's, Michelle Devane, "looks at what’s on offer for buyers ahead of the summer season... Eirene, Marino Avenue East, Killiney, Co Dublin Savills HOK Was: €6 million Now: €4.15 million Built in 1884, this spacious detached period residence was designed by the renowned Victorian architect Thomas Deane and is full of original period features. Eirene has been on the market for almost four months and its asking price has been reduced by 30 per cent to €4.15 million. With five-bedrooms and 325 square metres of living space, which is in need of modernisation, it is set on two acres of private mature grounds with views across Killiney Bay. The Dart station, Killiney beach and the Holy Child convent are within a couple of minutes walk... 49 Clarinda Park East, Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin Savills HOK Was: €2.55 million Now: €2.15 million Beautifully restored and refurbished, 49 Clarinda Park East is a two-storey over garden level propert...

Down, Down, Get On Down... So just how low can it get? Irish Times Property News: "Deep price cuts in end-of-season sales. WITH summer holidays looming and a glut of €1 millon plus homes on the market, and the realisation is finally setting in that a drastic price cut could be required to secure a buyer. While the property market has seen price "adjustments" across the board, heavy discounts are now offer in some cases. In the six properties listed here, the average price cut is 33.4 per cent. The slowdown has been particularly tough on high-end properties, which have a smaller pool of potential buyers. Price drops of over 30 per cent can mean upwards of €1 million being shaved off the asking price. KILLINEY: -31% EIRENE ON Marino Avenue East in Killiney, Co Dublin, came on the market in March at €6 million. Now three months later Savills HOK has cut the asking price to €4.15 million for the two acre property which is a stone's throw from the Dart and beach and may h...

www.daft.ie - Quarter 1 2008 Irish property figures are out - and according to today's Irish Independent Newspaper, we are in the middle of major Property price crash! There has been widespread price drops across the country and the trend looks set to continue for the foreseeable future... "ASKING prices for houses in some of the country's most affluent areas have plummeted by a massive 7pc in the space of just three months, according to a new survey published today. The report reveals property prices in the leafy suburbs of south county Dublin tumbled by an average of €40,000, or 6pc, in the first quarter of 2008. In Co Wicklow, prices also took a dramatic nose dive of more than €35,000 (7pc). The average price for a house in south county Dublin now stands at €649,383. Asking prices in Co Wicklow dropped to €445,681, the new survey by Daft.ie has found. Nationwide, the property slump caused asking prices to fall by 1.2pc. The drop is in sharp contrast to late 2007, when a...