Daft Property - Irish Property News

Warning that house prices may fall by 80%... HOUSING MARKET: IRELAND WILL see more demolition than construction of houses over the next decade, as the economy struggles to recover from the collapse of the housing market and the emergence of “zombie” banks , UCD economist Morgan Kelly told the conference. In a presentation that drew several collective intakes of breath, Mr Kelly predicted that house prices would fall by 80 per cent from peak to trough in real terms. “Construction, but not demolition, of residential and commercial property will fall to zero for the foreseeable future,” he said. Low levels of education among those employed in construction – where worker numbers peaked at about 280,000 – meant retraining would not be straightforward. Recovery will be slow: “It has taken us 10 years to get into this situation – it will in all likelihood take us 10 years to get out of it.” Mr Kelly said he had been hailed as being extremely prescient as a result of his warnings in relation t...

Latest figures confirm the "softening" in house prices and according to a report from the Irish Independent... " HOUSE prices fell by 9pc in the past year, wiping €27,500 off the value of the average home. National house prices fell by 0.7pc in March, according to yesterday's Permanent TSB/ERSI house price index. But the price decline for first-time buyer houses was greater, at 10pc, as potential buyers have been squeezed hard by banks hiking up interest rates for new customers. A 10pc drop in First-Time Buyer (FTB) house prices will see some 40,000 new buyers go into negative equity by the end of the year, according to Davy Stockbrokers. Negative equity is when the value of the mortgage is greater than the value of the home. Economists also warned that prices will have to fall further if first time buyers are to be enticed back into the market. New buyers have also been hit by the withdrawal of 100pc mortgages, and the need to find deposits of up to 10pc. Over a th...

More good news today? (...well for hopeful home buyers anyway!) Irish House prices look set to fall by at least 5pc in 2008. This is according to Austin Hughes (an IIB group Homeloans economist,) during a presentation on the housing market outlook in Ireland for 2008. He also added..."The housing slowdown has been a good bit more severe than I had anticipated."