Daft Property - Irish Property News

200,000 homes may need to be bulldozed -- bank AN explosive report has claimed that Ireland has so many empty houses that it would take up to 43 years to fill them all. Deutsche Bank figures suggest that there are 289,451 empty houses in Ireland, including almost 60,000 vacant holiday homes. This represents a vacancy rate of 15 per cent. As the Deutsche Bank map shows, the empty properties are highly concentrated around the Atlantic coast with Kerry and Donegal particularly badly afflicted. This glut of empty homes will have a major impact on future property prices. "Demand for housing is the key factor as to how long it will take for this oversupply to be reduced, and aside from demand for second homes the key driver should be population growth," Deutsche Bank notes. Based on 2011 figures which showed population growth of just 13,000, and the average number of residents per house, the bank estimates that it could take until 2055 for the glut of houses to be worked through...

Banks tell families -- no loans for homes... Mortgage approval plummets by 90% as banks hoard bailout cash A RECOVERY in the property market is being stopped dead in its tracks by the banks, which are turning down at least half of all mortgage applications -- mostly from people who are highly creditworthy. With many experts now convinced that the market has gone below bottom, the difficulty in accessing credit for even high-quality applicants has reached crisis point. Banks are continuing to reject applications for credit and 2011 looks like posting the worst mortgage-origination figures in four decades. On Friday AIB, which is to merge with Educational Building Society, won conditional approval from the European Commission for yet another capital injection -- this time of up to €13.1bn. It is part of more than €19bn that was approved after the latest bank stress tests and comes on top of billions in taxpayers' money that has already been pumped into the banking sector bu...

Tiny green shoots of property recovery brutally crushed by our Central Bank... Our leaders are facing the mother and father of all political and diplomatic battles in Brussels. 'I'M not happy with the idea that some governments obviously find some pleasure in torturing Ireland in the meetings and outside. I don't like this way of dealing with serious problems." These words are not those of Michael Noonan but of Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, chairman of the euro group of finance ministers. Juncker criticised the link between a lower interest rate on bailout loans and pressure to increase corporate tax. Again, they are words that could have been written by Noonan -- and my guess is that they were, in fact, inspired by Limerick's master of the soundbite. Only a few months ago, Noonan was bitterly critical of the Government for its failure to nourish our diplomatic relations with small EU countries such as Luxembourg, Denmark, the Netherlands...

Let's try it the French way... It is in the nature of all politicians to give hostages to fortune. So we can't really hold it against Brian Lenihan that he once, by his own account, deputising for Brian Cowen, went to Brussels and said: "Nous cherchons le soft landing." There is a scene in True Confessions (the film from John Gregory Dunne's novel) where seedy New York cop Robert Duvall raids a whorehouse, and one prostitute, in an effort to save her own skin, squeals: "Hey officer, not me. I do awful good French." As we try to drag our bruised bottoms up off the cold, hard landing, we may yet be grateful that our Finance Minister does awful good French. The French, you see, have turned it around (no joke intended). Along with the Germans, their economy grew between April and June, while ours plummeted into an abyss. And there was nothing laissez-faire about it either. They began with the same problems as the rest of us. They had negative growth, they ha...

Guru hobbs blames cowen as homeowners face 10 year wait for property price recovery... Financial guru Eddie Hobbs has lashed Taoiseach Brian Cowen for the "leadership vacuum" that has prevailed for the past year. And he warned that it could take up to 10 years for Irish property prices to return to anywhere near their pre-recession levels. In a hard-hitting critique of the country's leaders, Hobbs claimed the Government had failed to lead the nation for the past decade. "There was a lot more they could have done but I don't think the Government have properly governed the country for the past 10 years," he told the Herald. "Ireland has been governed by other forces instead, like developers and public sector income through the partnership process. Now that that process is fractured, the Government is only beginning to govern again. "I find it no coincidence that we're finally beginning to see leadership from Brian Cowen within days of the fractur...