Daft Property - Irish Property News

Nama may be forced to deliver on social housing... THE GOVERNMENT is considering plans to amend legislation that would oblige the National Asset Management Agency (Nama) to deliver more social housing and public amenities. Nama, created to purge banks of toxic property loans, has purchased some €31 billion of loans connected to thousands of residential properties – loans valued at over €72 billion at the height the property bubble. There is frustration in some circles of Government that the agency is not under any formal obligation to provide a “social dividend”. Minister for Housing Willie Penrose is understood to have written to the Attorney General in recent weeks seeking clarity on how Nama’s terms of reference could be changed to give it a broader remit that goes beyond securing the best achievable financial return for the State. Officials fear the agency is too focused on its commercial remit to generate profits and feel the State is at risk of losing out on opportuniti...

Ireland's future depends on breaking free from bailout... OPINION: Ireland is heading for bankruptcy, which would be catastrophic for a country that trades on its reputation as a safe place to do business. WITH THE Irish Government on track to owe a quarter of a trillion euro by 2014, a prolonged and chaotic national bankruptcy is becoming inevitable. By the time the dust settles, Ireland’s last remaining asset, its reputation as a safe place from which to conduct business, will have been destroyed. Ireland is facing economic ruin. While most people would trace our ruin to to the bank guarantee of September 2008, the real error was in sticking with the guarantee long after it had become clear that the bank losses were insupportable. Brian Lenihan’s original decision to guarantee most of the bonds of Irish banks was a mistake, but a mistake so obvious and so ridiculous that it could easily have been reversed. The ideal time to have reversed the bank guarantee was a few month...

'Property mania' at heart of bank crisis... The Nyberg report into the handling of the banking crisis has found that the main cause was the 'unhindered expansion of the property bubble'. The Nyberg report into the handling of the banking crisis has found that the crisis was the result of domestic Irish decisions and actions, and not international developments. The report, written by Finnish banking expert Peter Nyberg, said the main cause was the 'unhindered expansion of the property bubble', which was fuelled by banks using money borrowed from international markets. It said the risks linked to the bubble were undetected or seriously misjudged by the authorities. It said any warnings from the authorities were 'modest and insufficient'. The report said nobody abroad forced Irish households, investors, banks and authorities to take what it called 'unsustainable' financial risks. The report referred to the development of a 'national ...

Boomtime buyers bypassed apartments for a suburban semi... IT's a snapshot of home ownership at the end of the property bubble and shows that, for most of us, only a house is a home. New research shows that despite a raft of advertisements encouraging people to buy 'luxury' apartments in 'exclusive' developments during the boom, buyers instead chose the traditional semi-d in the suburbs. The Eurostat housing report 2009, published yesterday, shows that Ireland has the lowest level of flat dwelling in the European Union. Just 3.1pc of the population live in flats or apartments, compared to an EU average of 41.7pc. Given our population of 4.5 million people, it means that just under 140,000 people live in a flat. This is despite more than 130,000 being built between 2000 and 2009 during the property boom. The most popular form of housing is a semi-detached or terrace house -- almost 58pc live in these homes, more than twice the EU average of 23pc. Detached...

Ghost estate builders got €870m tax breaks... But no cash to finish 'eyesores' as 33,000 houses stand empty: DEVELOPERS got almost €870m in tax breaks to build thousands of houses that no one wants , the Irish Independent has learned. And the Government yesterday admitted there was no money to finish off the 2,800 ghost estates in which 33,000 houses and apartments are lying idle. Local communities will be stuck with these eyesores for years as bulldozing them has also been ruled out. And planners will not face any sanction for their role in fuelling the property bubble. The first official audit of the number of unsold and half-built houses and apartments in so-called ghost estates published by the Department of the Environment yesterday showed the full extent of the problem. The report found: * There are 2,846 ghost estates containing 33,225 empty units ready for sale. * Cork has the most unsold homes, 3,427. Limerick City has the least, 119. * Planning permission ...

Junkies and empty spaces litter streets where a dream died... The ill-fated Northern Quarter would have transformed our capital city: A mid-afternoon stroll around the place that would have been known as the Northern Quarter shows, emerging from the cracks, what we have come to expect in these days of broken dreams. There are junkies everywhere, in the numerous alleyways and on street corners, cravenly going about their business; there are the usual scatterings of beggars too, wrapped up quietly within themselves. In unequal measure, then, it is an uneasy landscape, both edgy and pathetic. People walk past, eyes in the distance, without taking notice -- or so it seems -- hurrying for trains, cars, buses, and bicycles, any mode at all out of the city and home. I was once familiar, indeed, with this area, before moving office in 2004, shortly after the arrival of the Luas -- a shining symbol of the new and of renewal, if ever there was one, at a time of optimism not that long ago. These ...

We're paying high price for blind eyes and denial... No event in the past 40 years, apart from the Arms Crisis of 1970, has been shrouded in as much state secrecy as the bank guarantee scheme introduced on the night of September 28, 2008. While everyone knows the outcome of the various meetings -- €485bn of liabilities were ultimately guaranteed -- only a small circle knows precisely what happened during the shuttle diplomacy between the banks and Brian Cowen's Government that night. Two books have been written, several newspaper accounts have been published and one or two of the participants have even spoken briefly about that fateful evening. But detailed, minuted information about the key decisions and key moments leading up to the guarantee has never been released. In fact a slew of Freedom of Information requests seeking these details has been flatly rejected, with the Department of Finance using highly charged language to explain why the public and the media cannot see su...

Department says it warned of property bubble... THE DEPARTMENT of Finance says it warned the Government from 2005 onwards about the dangers of a property bubble, internal official documents show. Briefing material prepared for the department’s secretary general Kevin Cardiff last month states that the department warned over several years that the “over-emphasis on construction left the economy vulnerable to macroeconomic shocks”. It also defends the department’s performance in failing to forecast the extent of the downturn, and points to similar failures by institutions such as the ESRI, Central Bank and the private sector to predict the magnitude of the slowdown. The material was prepared for the secretary general ahead of his appearance before the Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee just over a month ago. The contents of the documents have been released under the Freedom of Information Act in the same week Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan announced an external review of the depart...

Return to Commuterland... Ghost estates, negative equity and soul-sapping commutes are the legacy of our planning-free property bubble. Cleaning up the zoning mess won't be easy... THE MANTRA of the boom years might well have been “Build it and they will come.” And for 10 years or more it worked. But the frenzy of construction was bound to come to an end, leaving Ireland littered with incongruous developments – as well as tens of thousands of vacant houses in ghost estates. In 2003, when we first took a long look at the commuter counties, it was evident that much of this unplanned growth had been fuelled by Dubliners fleeing exorbitant property prices. Getting their hands on relatively affordable houses, even in places they had barely heard of, seemed worth the commute. The trend of Dublin leapfrogging into Leinster and even, with Cavan and Monaghan, into Ulster ran counter to all planning policies, but this was simply ignored. The complacent view at the time was that the growth of...

House prices 'set for further 10pc fall' says leading economist... House prices will fall by another 10pc before the market hits rock bottom next year, a leading economist predicted today. Jim Power, chief economist of Friends First, believes while the recession is likely to end around the middle of this year, consumer confidence and spending will continue to be undermined by wage cuts, an uncertain labour market and further reductions in state spending. The finance house revealed six out of 10 consumers are not confident in the Government's ability to revive the economy, with a third backing a Fine Gael/Labour coalition to do the job. Mr Power said it was difficult to be convinced the economic situation will improve considerably in the near future. "The Irish economy is going through an extremely difficult adjustment and the situation remains precarious. It is way too early to sound the all clear," he warned. "A fundamental reform of taxation and spending is...

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...

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...

Towns feel pain as jobs vanish... Ireland's towns, once noisy with the sounds of construction, are ominously quiet, as people get to grips with a new reality and the prospect of emigration, writes Ronan McGreevy . A WEEK AFTER Leitrim were knocked out of the Connacht championship by Galway, the county captain, Gary McCloskey, emigrated to London. McCloskey, who was Leitrim player of the year in 2007, had been out of work for five weeks, having been made redundant by Shine Construction, based in Athlone. Shine, which had been involved in several projects in the midlands including the development of Athlone town's new stadium, blamed the downturn in the building sector for its closure in May. The firm had debts of €3.5 million and assets of just €990,000. Twenty others lost their jobs. "I had no work for five weeks," says McCloskey, a Trinity College graduate in civil engineering. "It came to a crunch and that's it - hop on a plane to London. It was easy, given...

Came across a great article by Shaun Connolly, Political Correspondent, on the Irish Examiner Newspaper: " Clowning around in the doleful economic circus ... ROLL up! Roll up! Marvel at the economic circus act of the Two Brians — Mr Boom and Mr Bust! Thrill as Brian Cowen — Mr Boom — hurtles through the air powered only by the overheating property explosion! Scream as Brian Lenihan — Mr Bust — plunges back down to earth as the housing bubble bursts violently in his face! Quiver as the Two Brians tremble on the high wire together, desperately trying to keep their fiscal balance with no safety net blow them. The recession started precisely four minutes late as the Taoiseach and Finance Minister delayed their entry to what, by the look on their glum little faces, could well have passed for their political funerals. With the stock market collapsing at an even faster rate than the unemployment lines were growing, it was hardly any wonder both men looked sullen as they unveiled their my...