Daft Property - Irish Property News

Property prices fall again but pace eases... PROPERTY prices fell again last month, new figures out today show. Prices were down 0.5pc in March but this was a slower fall than in the previous month, according to the Central Statistics Office. In the year to March the fall was 3pc nationally. Dublin prices were 1.4pc higher than a year ago, despite a 0.8pc fall in March. Prices have now halved countrywide since the peak of the housing boom in 2007. Dublin prices are down 56pc, with those in the rest of the country down by 49pc. Although the pace of price falls have eased, the latest figures mean recovery in prices is still some way off. Report by  CHARLIE WESTON - Irish independent

Fall in house prices second-highest in EU... Irish house prices fell at the second-fastest rate in the European Union last year and at a rate that was almost five times faster than the EU average, according to data compiled by academics based at the National University of Ireland in Maynooth (NUIM). The figures published by the university’s All-Island Research Observatory show that Irish property prices are now nearly 30 per cent below a standardised average dating back to the middle of 2010. They indicate that the Republic has had the worst-performing property market in the EU over the last six years , although markets in Spain and Bulgaria have performed almost as badly in recent years. The data does contain some glimmers of hope that a recovery may be in sight or at least that the worst of the price falls are over. The figures, compiled from Eurostat price surveys, show the Republic reporting the third-highest quarterly property increases in the third quarter of last ye...

House prices go into reverse as property register takes guesswork out of buying... HOUSE prices fell last month in a move that reverses rises in the previous three months. The fall of 0.6pc in October means that prices have now risen in five of the 10 months of this year so far.  The value of the average property in the State is now half of what it was during the peak in the market in 2007. Dublin prices were down 0.2pc in October, and are 7pc lower in the year so far. Residential property prices in the capital are 56pc lower than they were when the market was at its highest, according to the CSO index. Prices outside of Dublin were down 0.9pc last month, and are now down 47pc from the peak. Some property experts said the introduction of the new property price register in September prompted falls in prices, as people can now seen exactly what prices houses and apartments are selling for, rather than relying on estate agents. The average value of a property nationally...

Rates wipe out benefits of decline in house prices... BENEFITS to first-time buyers from drastic falls in property prices are wiped out by sharp increases in mortgage costs, new research shows. House prices have dived by 40pc since 2007, which means potential buyers would need a much smaller mortgage. But a series of mortgage-rate hikes by all lenders mean that the cost of servicing even a small mortgage has shot up. Mortgage expert Karl Deeter accused banks of capturing most of the gains for potential buyers of lower prices by pushing up mortgage costs. Mr Deeter of Irish Mortgage Brokers looked at the cost of a 30-year mortgage for a €350,000 house at the top of the housing bubble in 2007. At that time buyers would have been able to get a good value tracker set at 1pc above the ECB rate. This would mean a borrowing rate of 2.25pc. The monthly repayments for this mortgage at the moment work out at €1,337, without factoring in mortgage tax relief. Mr Deeter said that th...

Struggling homeowners turn to SVP... Under-pressure homeowners are using every last cent to pay their mortgage bills, leaving them so short of cash they are turning to the Society of St Vincent de Paul for extra money to buy food and pay utility bills. In the capital, St Vincent de Paul volunteers dealt with a massive 10,000 calls in the first four months of this year -- up 30 per cent on 2009. Now they fear there will be a further raft of people in trouble with their mortgages when redundancy payments given to people who lost their jobs last year run out. According to ratings agency Moody's, the number of Irish people who have fallen behind in their mortgage repayments has come close to doubling in the last 12 months. The rate of delinquency in mortgage repayments -- those with more than 90 days of mortgage arrears -- rose to 3.8 per cent in March up from 2.1 per cent during the same month last year. According to John Monaghan of the St Vincent de Paul Society, more and more peopl...

Economic downturn wipes 50pc off value of homes... LARGE detached family homes in the capital have halved in value in the downturn. Estate agents admit four- and five-bedroom detached properties in Dublin are now only fetching 50pc of their 2007 prices. This means upwardly-mobile couples who shelled out an average of €1m at the height of the boom years are now sitting in a house worth just €500,000. The Irish Auctioneers and Valuers Institute (IAVI), which represents auctioneers around the country, says that houses nationally are now worth 40pc less than at the peak. Connacht has seen the smallest drop in house prices but even these are dramatic. The average two-bedroom townhouse in the region has fallen in value by 27.7pc. Things are much worse in Dublin for struggling homeowners who are seeing themselves plunged further into negative equity as prices have plummeted by half. But this is all good news for buyers with cash today. The IAVI annual property survey released shows that new t...

The average Dublin house price is now €242,000 according to the latest Daft report... ASKING prices for residential property around the country fell by 19 per cent during 2009 and are now nationally 30 per cent below asking levels in early 2007, according to Daft’s latest house price report published today. The national average asking price for residential property at the end of 2009 was €242,000 – a fall of €107,000 from the peak in early 2007. In Dublin, asking prices have dropped by up to 42 per cent since the peak says the report. Earlier this week the country ’s largest estate agency chain, Sherry FitzGerald, said that house prices had dropped 20.3 per cent nationally in 2009, and in Dublin, had fallen in real terms by 45.7 per cent since 2006. Commenting on the link between price falls and movement on the market, Daft economist Ronan Lyons says that while Dublin saw the largest fall in house prices in 2009 “the total stock for sale in the capital fell by almost 20 per cent over...

If the Green Party has its way, there will be no immediate recovery in property values... THE LAST few months have been spent analysing the wreck that is the Irish property market. Though most attention in recent weeks has centred on Liam Carroll’s attempts to save the Zoe group of companies, punters have been equally interested in the huge price reductions for new apartments and second-hand homes. Luckily for first-time buyers, there are mortgages available for many of those who can comply with the strict new ground rules on job security, earnings and savings. For others anxious to trade up now that prices are on the floor, there can be little prospect of securing bank loans unless the Nama strategy works and the banks are recapitalised to resume lending, first of all to businesses and, after that, to house purchasers. Mind you, the events of last week did little to inspire much confidence in the property industry. Firstly, there was the proposal to introduce a punitive property tax o...

House prices to fall until 2012, industry bosses told... HOUSE prices will continue to slide until 2012, it has been claimed, as construction chiefs were told the industry will never be the same again. Yesterday’s figures also show that lending to the construction industry soared from €10 million in 2001 to €115m at its peak. The statistics were revealed at the Construction Industry Federation (CIF) conference in Cork. Labour party leader Eamon Gilmore said that the industry will never again employ the same number of people as it did two years ago. He said there will again be a demand for new housing but he wants a construction industry – like any other – that is sustainable. At its peak in 2007, the industry employed 280,000 direct employees and a further 120,000 indirect, equivalent to 19% of total employment. Today it employs 200,000 but the CIF said that another 100,000 direct and indirect jobs could still be lost. Mr Gilmore also said there is huge scope for reform in Ireland’s pl...

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 ...

IT’S 3 a.m. at Doheny & Nesbitt, a favorite watering hole of Dublin’s political and business elite, and the property tycoon Sean Dunne stoops to retrieve a penny from the pub’s grimy floor. One would think that Mr. Dunne, Ireland’s best-known building developer, would be in bed at this hour. It’s a weeknight, after all, and he has meetings that begin before first light. What’s more, the Irish economy, pummeled by the most severe housing bust in Europe, has collapsed. And the gossip around town is that Mr. Dunne, whose brazen deal-making and Donald Trump-like lifestyle epitomized the country’s euphoric boom, might be going bankrupt. But, no matter, a penny is a penny. “I am never, never too proud to pick a penny up from the floor,” Mr. Dunne said. He is on perhaps his fifth pint of Guinness, capping a rollicking night of Champagne cocktails, followed by a wine-soaked dinner — yet his thick brogue is clear of even the faintest slurring. “I grew up with nothing and I know the value of...

AS CHRISTMAS and 2009 loom some vendors are cutting prices to get buyers off the fence . Number 7 Claremont Road in Howth has a new asking price of €3.75m, down from €4.8m, a drop of €1.05m or 22 per cent. For sale through Savills, the four-bed Georgian-style home first came on the market in August. It ticks all the boxes for a trophy home with 418sq m (4,500sq ft) of space and three large reception rooms. A large basement could be used as a gym, music room or home cinema. Gunne Residential is asking €1.95m for an Edwardian semi - 4 Proby Square off Carysfort Avenue in Blackrock, Co Dublin - which is a 29 per cent drop from the original price of €2.75m. The house has been on the market a number of times in the past five years. In September 2003 it sold for €1.625m with 0.25 acres of rear and side garden with development potential. The following year the house sold with a substantially reduced garden for €1.5m. The six-bed, 300sq m (3,200sq ft) house is in a cul-de-sac. Gunne Residentia...

It's less middle of the road, more end of the road as the reality of the recession sets in with mid-income families who'd become used to mochas, Maseratis and Manolo Blahniks, writes Justine McCarthy You've probably heard most of the blood-curdling stories by now. There's that one about the corporate wide boys dumping their flash unpaid-for cars in the airport car park before hopping on the emigrant Airbus. And the one about crèches haemorrhaging toddlers as their highflying parents stagger to the dole office clutching their P45s. Or the one about builders offering free Lamborghinis and villas in the sun in a last-chance-saloon effort to flog three-bed new-builds in commuter-land. Or the mother 'n' father of all the doomsday tales: the one about the once mega-rich tycoon spending his last million hiring bodyguards to protect him from his angry creditors. You've probably heard them, and thought: Sure, and pigs fly. Perhaps it comes from a defiant optimism ro...

Prices down by 40% since peak... 2008 Review: PROPERTY VALUES: Residential property prices have fallen further than people realise, says estate agency chief Keith Lowe - but he says next year could show a recovery THERE IS STILL much after-dinner discussion as to what is really happening in the residential property market, only now the subject matter has changed from how high prices are, to how far property prices have really fallen. At the moment, due to data protection legislation, the media, buyers and sellers alike are starved of accurate information on the actual sale prices that are being achieved for property, leaving consumers with a wholly unsatisfactory vacuum of information. As a result, most interested parties turn to the plethora of house price indices produced by a variety of organisations. One of the most respected indexes is the Permanent TSB/ESRI house price survey. Having the ESRI involved has given this survey independence whereas other surveys are deemed to have so...

A new survey by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) has found that not only are current property prices in Ireland the worst in the world, but the outlook for Irish commercial property values is also dire ... After a decade of phenomenal rises, Irish property has hit its lowest level yet. It's a far cry from those halcyon days when five of the ten counties with the highest house-price growth in the UK over the past decade were in Northern Ireland, with County Armagh's prices more than trebling. Commercial property Irish commercial property prices fell for the first time in five years during the first quarter of this year in what has been termed as an ‘unprecedented reversal' of the once buoyant market. Returns in the quarter were the worst since 1995. Since the beginning of the year, the Irish property investment market has been characterised by a lack of transactional activity, with only £322 million of Irish investment deals signed in the six months to the e...

Shit happens, but why Brian? Brian Cowen seems to have decided to take refuge in a variation on what is known in political speak as the Bart Simpson defence. And no, relax, he's not suggesting we eat his shorts, more the other Bartism: "I didn't do it, nobody saw me do it, you can't prove anything.'' Cowen's version was: "There's no crisis, OK maybe there is a crisis but it's not my fault, why can't you people get it through your thick skulls that there is a crisis." Back at the start of the summer, when even Fine Gael knew there was something wrong, Cowen was telling us that the fundamentals were sound. Having announced a saving of half a billion, which was going to solve all our problems, Cowen and his whole Government then disappeared for the whole summer as the world plunged into crisis. Then they all reappeared after their long break to concede that, all things taken into account and having examined the figures, there might be a p...

Country now paying for 'one hell of a borrowing binge'... WE HAVE been on "one hell of a borrowing and spending binge" in recent years and now we have to face up to a radical change in our standard of living and expectations , the Céifin conference heard. Jim Power, chief economist with Friends First, said the Government's role in allowing spending to grow by 10-12 per cent a year in recent years was "absolutely criminal" and we would now pay for that mismanagement. Personal debt rose from €20 billion to more than €140 billion between 1999 and 2007, he said. "That is . . . one hell of a borrowing binge." Asked about the role of the banks in fuelling spending, Mr Power said he had worked as a banker for 20 "very unhappy years" and the incentivisation structures always worried him. "You were incentivised on the quantity of what you sold, not on the quality. I think the incentivisation structure did encourage irresponsible behaviour...

Homeowners left reeling as 30pc price fall predicted... HOME owners are reeling from a double-whammy of bad news, after both an international broker and one of Ireland's leading economists warned house prices could plummet even further over the coming months. In a statement announcing the predictions, international broker Credit Suisse said that Ireland's property market is continuing to tumble, with house prices potentially falling by another 30pc over the coming months. The internationally-respected firm has made the comments because it says the market is only reacting to the credit crunch now. The upshot is that the impact of the credit crunch has yet to filter through to the Irish housing market, with any weakness already experienced down to a drop in demand rather than tighter credit. "As a result, we see mortgage affordability decreasing and house price declines accelerating. What is more, the housing market has been underpinned by strong immigration and rental deman...