Daft Property - Irish Property News

The Irish economy is set to repeat its old mistake of excess mortgage-lending... The run-up to Christmas is always a good time for burying bad news and this year was no different. On the Friday before Christmas, Bank of Ireland announced it was going to have to put more money aside to absorb possible losses on Irish residential mortgages. Just how much more money was not very clear but it would appear to run into several hundred million euro. The statement was extremely technical and did not actually talk about losses or defaults. But the point is clear. The bank had already put aside some money to absorb losses that might occur as a result of people not being able to pay their mortgages. It now seems that more people than expected are going to default and the bank has had to put some extra money aside. It is as timely a reminder as you could hope for that the Irish banks are still broken and still fighting their way through a mountain of problem mortgages as a result of their rec...

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...

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...

Bubble bubble toil and trouble...

Property prices fall further as Dublin second-hand homes drop by 10.4%... THE AVERAGE cost of a new house was just over 3 per cent lower in the first three months of this year than in the same period last year, according to new figures from the Department of the Environment. Prices of second-hand houses suffered a sharper fall of 5.4 per cent, but the greatest decline was in the price of second-hand houses in Dublin which were 10.4 per cent lower in the first quarter of the year than in the same period of 2007. The price of new houses in the capital fell by 4.8 per cent... The department's housing statistics show a steady increase in the provision of social and affordable housing, but very steep declines in the total numbers of houses built and started in the first three months of the year. Just over 14,000 houses were completed, a decline of 30 per cent on the first quarter of 2007. The number of houses on which construction began was even more dramatically reduced. There were jus...

The Irish Examiner mentions in a report today: SURGING unemployment and sliding tax returns helped blow a €5.6bn black hole in Government finances last night... The opposition’s ire focused on Mr Cowen, who had been Finance Minister up to May, rather than Mr Lenihan. Labour leader Eamon Gilmore accused Mr Cowen of “walking the country into the red”. Fine Gael finance spokesman Richard Bruton said Mr Cowen had to take personal responsibility for the scale of downturn as he had introduced four inflationary budgets designed to meet the needs of the “electoral cycle, not the economic cycle”. These budgets had used the unsustainable revenues from the property boom to “ramp up spending increases” at twice the rate of growth of the economy, Mr Bruton said. The Irish Independent paints a similar gloomy black hole picture... MINISTERS will have to cut €500m from their spending plans to pay for increased dole payments, as the property slump blows a €3bn black hole in their tax take. Departmen...