Daft Property - Irish Property News

Building slowdown stalls attempt to complete 2,000 'ghost' estates... WORK TO complete the State’s 2,000 unfinished housing developments has stalled due to a 40 per cent drop in on-site construction activity this year, according to the latest figures from the Department of the Environment. However, the vacancy rate of completed houses on “ghost” estates has fallen by one-fifth since the department published its survey on the extent of the problem last year. In addition, demolition has begun on estates were there is no prospect of completion, the department said. Last October the department published its first national survey of the extent of the ghost estate problem, where developments are left unfinished and only a fraction of homes are occupied. It identified more than 2,800 unfinished or vacant housing estates. A year on, some 700 estates have been completed and a further 100 on which no substantial work had started have been taken out of development, leaving a tot

House prices will keep falling this year despite growth... HOUSE prices will continue to fall this year despite a return to economic growth, the Government has warned. And a report from the Department of the Environment warns that almost 200,000 homeowners are facing negative equity by the end of the year -- where one-in-four mortgage holders will be forced to pay off loans that exceed the value of their homes. The Housing Market Overview 2009 also says price recovery will take longer outside major urban centres, and that the downturn may be "longer or more severe" than expected . This means that demolition could be the only option for the thousands of housing units due to come under the control of NAMA because they are unlikely to ever sell. Unsold Officials from the department have begun a count of the number of unsold housing units across the country, with some estimates saying up to 300,000 may be empty. "The International Monetary Fund has analysed house-price cycle

Cuffe backs demolition of some 'ghost' estates... NEW GREEN Party Minister of State for the Environment Ciarán Cuffe yesterday said the blame for unfinished, or “ghost” housing estates lay with “the ‘cargo cult’ of rezoning for all the wrong reasons” that drove development in recent years. In his first major speech since taking office last month Mr Cuffe said “selective demolitions will be a necessary part of the tasks required to tackle the legacy of one of the more unsavoury aspects of Ireland’s building boom”. Addressing the annual conference of the Irish Planning Institute (IPI) in Tullamore, Co Offaly, he said: “I have no doubt that some loans that will come into the possession of the Nama will result in the demolition of badly designed buildings in inappropriate locations.” But demolition would not be the only option. “We now have to look quite realistically at the future use of unfinished estates and the needs of residents . . . It’s not as simple as sending in a bulldoz

Demolition the only way to build a better future... WITH THE building frenzy of the last decade and a half, who would have thought that we would be thinking of knocking some of it down again? But Brendan McDonagh, chief executive of Nama, probably got it right when he talked about the need to demolish some of the surplus stock in out-of-the-way locations. Everyone now knows that some of these estates will never be lived in, because they are not within easy commuting distance of jobs, or because there simply was never a market for them in the first place. It wasn’t just the bankers and the developers who got it wrong. The planners in the various local authorities have also made grave errors in allowing many of these estates to be developed in one horse towns and obscure villages. These developments – many of them large executive-style homes – simply did not make sense, even in buoyant times. Some of them are now an eyesore, and could disappear even faster than it took to build them. The