Daft Property - Irish Property News

Underwater mortgages: a guide to survival... Latest estimates suggest that as many as 340,000 home-owners, or one in five homes, are stuck in negative equity... HINDSIGHT IS a wonderful thing. Looking back at the prices people paid for Irish property during the boom, it’s easy to see how unsustainable they were. However at the time, despite warnings from everyone from the Central Bank to the Economist magazine that Ireland’s property market was a bubble which had to burst, banks and consumers ignored the advice and ploughed money into property, propping up prices until the inevitable collapse during 2008. Now, latest estimates suggest that as many as 340,000 home owners, or one in five homes, are stuck in negative equity and prices are still sliding . If this is the case, then people who purchased property as far back as 2003 with loan-to-values (LTVs) of more than 80 per cent, will discover that they owe more to the bank than what their house is worth. For example, at the peak of the ...