Daft Property - Irish Property News

Write-offs and negative-equity loans already on offer -- just don't tell everyone The debate about debt forgiveness has raged across the nation, polarising public opinion. Laura Noonan investigates what banks are really doing to help struggling homeowners. It might surprise people to know that some banks have been embarking on forms of mortgage write-offs for quite some time. And that's not all that's been going on -- some of the other new-fangled "solutions" expected to be recommended by the Government's latest mortgage expert group, like negative-equity mortgages, are already in action, too. The reason the public don't know about these developments is simple -- the banks don't want the masses to know. Because as soon as you admit things like this are happening, you run the risk that everyone will want a piece of the action. The action so far has largely been limited to borrowers who've actually left their home by way of "volu

Struggle to pay bills is about to get much worse... With a swathe of EU interest rate hikes coming our way, mortgages will shoot up by thousands of euro a year: THE President of the European Central Bank (ECB), Jean-Claude Trichet, shocked us all last week when he suggested that the next ECB rate hike could be as early as this April. There are already 60,000 homeowners struggling to pay their mortgages. With a raft of European interest rate hikes on the cards, many of them will find it even harder to pay their mortgage in a few weeks' time -- and tens of thousands more homeowners will share their fate. We all knew that the ECB interest rate -- which influences the amount of interest you pay on your mortgage -- was on its way up. Yet surging oil prices and a pick-up in eurozone inflation mean this rate hike will now happen a lot sooner than we ever expected. Some economists believe the ECB rate could increase four times this year. As the ECB rate has been at an all-time