Daft Property - Irish Property News

200,000 homes may need to be bulldozed -- bank AN explosive report has claimed that Ireland has so many empty houses that it would take up to 43 years to fill them all. Deutsche Bank figures suggest that there are 289,451 empty houses in Ireland, including almost 60,000 vacant holiday homes. This represents a vacancy rate of 15 per cent. As the Deutsche Bank map shows, the empty properties are highly concentrated around the Atlantic coast with Kerry and Donegal particularly badly afflicted. This glut of empty homes will have a major impact on future property prices. "Demand for housing is the key factor as to how long it will take for this oversupply to be reduced, and aside from demand for second homes the key driver should be population growth," Deutsche Bank notes. Based on 2011 figures which showed population growth of just 13,000, and the average number of residents per house, the bank estimates that it could take until 2055 for the glut of houses to be worked through...

The hangover of Ireland's property boom: Abandoned ghost estates and lifeless houses stripped of their worth... Anyone against debt forgiveness should read this dispatch from a ghost estate... and thank God it's them instead of you... Rhoda Brogan stands at the front door of her three-bed semi, quietly surveying the abandoned, lifeless houses that surround her. In the centre of the estate there is a green area, wildly overgrown with weeds and nettles and circled by a cracked road and street lights that don't work. It is eerily calm; there are no cars driving around, no children playing - the only sound is the wind. All of a sudden, Rhoda’s eyes narrow and focus on an abandoned home directly across the road and she considers something for a moment before noticing the open windows. ‘Oh my God! Someone has got into that house since I left this morning,’ she says, quickly crossing the street with her four-year-old daughter, Saoirse, in tow. Around the back of the em...

National group to oversee efforts to deal with ghost estates... A NATIONAL co-ordination group is to be established within weeks to oversee action by local authorities in dealing with the most problematic ghost housing estates, according to Minister of State for Housing and Planning Willie Penrose. Addressing the Irish Planning Institute’s annual conference in Galway yesterday, he said one of his top priorities was that “clear, decisive and proactive actions are taken to progressively resolve the issues with unfinished housing developments”. It has emerged that the National Asset Management Agency (Nama) has 10 per cent of about 150 of the worst ghost estates that are unfinished and pose health and safety issues. The vast majority of the ghost estates that require the most work were financed by the foreign-owned banks operating in Ireland. About 28 per cent of the loans at Nama relate to land and development and about 16 per cent are in the Dublin area, where there is a great...

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 ...

Land rezoned for 800,000 more homes than needed... Glut highlights role councillors played in fuelling the boom. COUNCILS have rezoned enough land to build almost 800,000 new homes that the country does not need, an Irish Independent investigation has found. Local authorities have rezoned enough land to construct almost 1.1 million houses and apartments across the country at a time when thousands of homes lie empty in 'ghost estates'. But official projections received by the Government have found fewer than 300,000 new units are needed between now and 2016. The revelation highlights the extent of the role councillors and planners have played in fuelling the property boom which collapsed with devastating consequences. Some councils including Meath rezoned up to 60 times more land for residential use than was needed. Just two out of 34 councils -- Limerick and North Tipperary -- under-zoned land. Councils who designated too much land for housing will now be forced by the Governme...

David McWilliams: We're all fools if we think recovery plan is patriotic... It's been nearly 18 months since the Government announced its bank guarantee. Anglo Irish Bank was nationalised over a year ago and it is coming up to a year since the Government first mooted the NAMA plan. Yet nothing has actually been done since then. Not a single loan has been transferred to NAMA. There has been lots of talk, lots of bluster and point scoring, but still credit in the economy contracts, house prices continue their slow strangling decline and, most significantly, the rest of the world has moved on. Why the delay? One interpretation is that our government doesn't understand that speed is crucial. If we compare our stagnation with other countries that have been faced with national bankruptcy, we compare dreadfully. Look at what the Swedes achieved in their crisis of 1993 when their property market collapsed along with their banks. In the four months between November 1993 and February...

New report will show number of empty homes well above 300,000... With so much vacant property about, councils are now actively seeking homes to rent from a minimum of 10 years for those on waiting lists... A REPORT being finalised by planners at UCD for publication this month is expected to conclude that the number of empty houses or apartments in the State may be even higher than the 302,625 figure suggested recently by their colleagues in NUI Maynooth. Dr Brendan Williams, lead author of the UCD report, told The Irish Times that “our figures might be higher”. He had also visited some uncompleted housing estates last weekend and they painted a “bleak picture” of the current levels of vacant housing. The 300,000-plus figure, calculated by the Maynooth-based National Institute of Regional and Spatial Analysis (Nirsa), took a lot of people by surprise – especially as the Construction Industry Federation had been sticking to a vacancy rate of around 40,000. It was also way above the Depa...