Daft Property - Irish Property News

Don't blame us for 170,000 house surplus, say builders... BUILDERS yesterday denied that too many houses went up at the height of the boom -- insisting they built to the demand that existed. Hubert Fitzpatrick, director of housing and planning services at the Construction Industry Federation (CIF), made the comments after a new report claimed 170,000 more houses were built than were needed during the property bubble. The organisation is now calling on the Government to conduct a national audit to provide "accurate" data on the number of empty homes. It argues that a definitive account of the situation has not been presented -- because reports probing the issue are measuring housing stock in different ways. The latest report into housing published yesterday by University College Dublin (UCD) and Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) found a total of 345,000 homes -- or 17pc of all housing -- were currently lying empty. It said that even without considering holiday homes and

Mortgage lending at lowest level since records began... MORTGAGE lending plunged last year to the lowest level since records began in 2005, as borrowing by investors and those seeking to trade up plummeted. Just €8.08bn of mortgage loans were issued in 2009, a 65pc drop on the previous year, the Irish Banking Federation said yesterday. The number of loans made fell 58.5pc to 45,818. “The data illustrate how difficult 2009 was for the mortgage market,” Irish Banking Federation boss Pat Farrell said. “The general economic situation, consumer confidence, the unsold housing stock and house-price movements will be among the factors to influence market activity in 2010.” Despite the plunge, first-time buyers and people moving house still only accounted for two-thirds of mortgage lending in the final quarter of 2009. Investors and those seeking socalled top-ups or remortgages accounted for the remainder. The market remains so moribund that there are more people borrowing money to “top up” the

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

Over 600 ghost estates stand as haunting legacy of crash... THE startling scale of Ireland's property crash is laid bare today as academics reveal that more than 600 'ghost' estates are scattered around the country. For the first time, a comprehensive map charts the locations of the empty and abandoned developments that stand as haunting monuments to the Celtic Tiger splurge . The analysis suggests pockets of the north-west and midlands will be worst hit by a housing glut that will take years to sell off. Largely rural counties Leitrim, Longford, Roscommon and Sligo have the highest number of partially built and semi-vacant housing estates when measured against their populations. Their relative distance from major cities is expected to compound their oversupply problem for the foreseeable future. Although Cork has 96 so-called 'ghost' estates and Dublin 58 -- the highest figures by county -- it is believed that their urban populations can absorb the surplus much soo

State to rent Nama properties for social housing... The government plans to rent thousands of vacant houses and apartments from the National Asset Management Agency (Nama) and use them for social housing. Representatives of the new ‘bad bank’ have held meetings with officials in the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government to explore the possibility of renting out properties that would otherwise lie empty. Housing minister Michael Finneran said his officials were seeking to ensure a ‘‘social dividend’’ from Nama by renting residential units on long-term leases for social housing purposes. Finneran said an arrangement could help to deliver ‘‘a return in line with Nama’s mandate’’. The government is under pressure to demonstrate to the European Commission that Nama will be capable of generating significant ongoing cash flows over its lifetime, and that the new agency will not be excessively generous to participating banks. While a move to rent properties for social ho

THE head of Ireland's auctioneers and the former Finance Minister Ray MacSharry have clashed over the future of the so-called 'ghost estates' left over from the property boom. President of the IAVI (Irish Auctioneers and Valuers Institute) Aine Myler has suggested that some new estates may have to be demolished altogether as part of an ongoing effort to restore stability to the property market. Speaking to the Sunday Independent at the IAVI's annual conference in Dublin on Friday, Ms Myler said that as a result of poor planning and a lack of infrastructure, some of the country's newer housing stock may never be required. Asked what could be done with these developments, Ms Myler said: "It's really difficult to know. It shows up a number of issues that emerged during the boom, where there was poor planning, the building of large estates where there was no infrastructure, no transport links and other links which have probably diminished in the meantime as a r

Shocking new probe shows 302,000 homes are left empty... More than 300,000 houses are lying empty around the country -- three times the official estimate, says a team of academics. The scale of vacant housing -- equivalent to half of all homes in Dublin -- could be enough to meet demand for years to come. The figure was worked out by the National Institute of Regional and Spatial Analysis (Nirsa), based at NUI Maynooth, which advises the Government. It is up to three times the estimate from Housing Minister Michael Finneran, who last week told the Cabinet there were between 100,000 and 140,000 houses lying empty. The construction industry suggested it was 40,000. NIRSA director Prof Rob Kitchin said he decided to calculate accurately the extent of empty housing because official figures do not exist -- only estimates. Along with colleagues, he used the GeoDirectory (Ireland's national address database), the 2006 Census and Department of Environment figures based on ESB connection p

Time to raze the unfinished relics of the building boom... Ireland is about to witness a US-style degeneration of half- built housing schemes into ghost estates, says Juno McEnroe. FORMER US President Thomas Jefferson once said that small landholders are the most precious part of a state. In Ireland this phrase rang true during the boom with the first-time buyers and start-up investors who were encouraged to throw their cash into property. At one stage the property and construction sector made up over 20% of Government income. A precious pot for the State indeed. But just as Jefferson’s ideology of giving tracts of land to ordinary US citizens ended up benefiting greedy speculators, Ireland’s property investment schemes during the boom saw towns ravaged by sprawl, over-development and a plethora of ‘phantom’ or ‘ghost estates’ that now look unlikely ever to be finished . So it now looks as though the landholders will be the most worthless, or even the costliest, part of our esteemed st

OPINION : By 2015, Iceland will almost certainly be a lot better off than Ireland because it dealt decisively with its banks ... WHILE THINGS are hard to predict, the future, especially the situation of the Irish economy, is so stark that even an economist can make some predictions that stand a chance of being right. Two ghosts of Christmas will haunt Ireland in 2015: jobs and debt. For 20 years, the Irish economy experienced extraordinary growth. Unfortunately, this growth came from two separate booms that merged imperceptibly into each other. First we had real growth in the 1990s, driven by rising competitiveness and exports. However, after 2000 competitiveness collapsed, and growth came to be driven by a lending bubble without equal in the euro zone. As Michael Hennigan of Finfacts (www.finfacts.ie) has pointed out, of the half million jobs created in the last decade, only 4,000 were in exporting firms; and fewer people now work in IDA-supported companies than in 2000. The Irish eco

Architects offer ideas for country's 'ghost estates'... IT IS a future where empty housing estates are used as crematoriums and there is a scrappage scheme for ugly one-off country homes. As the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) prepares to begin operations in the new year, a group of architects have put forward suggestions for what can be done with the unfinished constructions and 'ghost estates', legacies of the economic downturn. From an unfinished hotel which has been handed over to the community, to a 'two-for-one' scheme for unsold houses, the 'Shadowland' exhibition which opened in Dublin yesterday floats some realistic and some more improbable ideas. Among the suggestions are a 'City of Dead', where abandoned or unsold houses are used as crematoriums and chapels. FKL architects, which organised the exhibitions, have also suggested a scrappage scheme for houses. One-off homes would be knocked down and the residents rehoused in to

Danger lurks in the ghost estates haunting our towns and villages... Mark Twain once famously said: "Buy land, they're not making it any more." But the mantra in Ireland during the past 10 years could easily have been: "Buy land -- and build on every inch." Across the country, rash zoning decisions in small towns and villages saw housing estates spring up. Ballyforan in Co Roscommon is one village where sales of new homes have stalled, and prices have now been slashed in an attempt to lure buyers. Built in what is essentially a one-street village, the Claremont development is now offering homes as part of the rent-to-buy scheme. Costing from €650 per month, it's the "easy way to owning your dream home" according to the blurb. Another, Pairc Caislean, has hoarding up around an empty site adjacent to some already completed houses. In Roscommon, and other counties such as Cavan, Longford and Leitrim, tax incentives saw scores of developers building la

Crazy to sell in a buyer's market? If you are considering selling property but are afraid it might be neither nor viable nor sensible at this time, you may be pleasantly surprised to discover that there is a market out there – you just have to know your audience and what appeals to them... If you have a property that you are keen to sell, you may be debating the wisdom of doing so at a time when prices are dipping and so many others are holding back, but though it may feel like a lonely and risky path to take now, you would not be the only person in the country doing it. "We're seeing a mix of people selling at the moment," says Gillian Flanagan of Felicity Fox Auctioneers in Dublin. "We have a lot of people trading up, particularly young families with children who have outgrown the space they're in, people who need to move because their employment has changed location and people from different countries who are moving home. At the same time, a lot of people

Life for the boom's dead spaces... The Irish landscape is scarred with the remnants of failed or unfinished building schemes from the Celtic Tiger years. GEMMA TIPTON asks some leading architects to use their imaginations and suggest ways to put them to some use. EVEN DURING THE boom, it was difficult to see some of the things we were building and imagine them as a success. Enormous luxury golf and spa hotels in the middle of nowhere, shoe-box apartment blocks in small towns, ghost estates where no houses were ever sold , and massive out-of-town retail and industrial parks – all these have blighted the landscape, and now stand in various stages of construction or dereliction, mocking us with the question: what should we do with them? Some ways out of such waste have already been proposed: turning the hotels into nursing homes is one example. Or we could look to SoHo in New York, where inner-city factories and warehouses became, first, artists’ studios and then ultra-desirable loft

Collapse in house prices will be good for economy... Many people in recent weeks have tried to explain what is happening to the economy. How can we visualise why credit has dried up? How do we rationalise the fact that we went from a situation of so much money we didn't know what to do with it, to a situation of no cash at all? Where did it all go? One interesting way to look at this, and this column has used it before, is to think of events in the natural world. Think of the aerial photos of the Serengeti at the beginning of the annual rainy season. What was a parched arid climate where nothing grows suddenly become florid, verdant and full of life. Animals, flowers insects flourish and the place is abuzz. We see migrating wildebeest, crocs and birds and then, at the height of the season, the whole plain is crackling with energy, fuelled by that most precious of commodities, water. Then as the seasons change, the water begins to evaporate. Life disappears from the edges of the pla

New rules may force 'firesale' of 70,000 houses... BUILDERS could be forced to dramatically slash the prices of more than 70,000 new houses that are now lying empty across the country, a leading construction advisor has warned. In a damning new analysis -- obtained by the Irish Independent -- it is claimed that developers will have to offload the massive volume of vacant homes in a 'firesale' before the Government's new energy guidelines come into effect on July 1. The new study found the number of new homes lying empty in 'ghost' estates is far larger than was previously estimated. The findings reveal there are at least 100,000 'surplus' homes -- far higher than the 30,000 estimated by construction industry chiefs and estate agents. According to the analysis, carried out by Tony O'Brien, head of business consulting for accountancy firm Grant Thornton, market conditions suggest some 30,000 of these will be sold in the current economic climate. Bu