Daft Property - Irish Property News

Home repossessions will soar as 6,400 are in arrears... AN avalanche of repossessions is now expected after new figures show close to 6,400 people stopped paying their mortgages more than a year ago. The number who have failed to pay their mortgages for a period of 12 months or more is three times the level it was at a year ago. These homeowners are now almost certain to have their homes repossessed. Pressure And struggling homeowners face renewed pressure from next month, which will be the first time Bank of Ireland and AIB will be able to begin new legal proceedings against homeowners who have failed to pay their mortgage for a year. A moratorium agreed with the Government forced the banks to wait a year before starting legal action to repossess homes from those who failed to pay their mortgages. Many of the 6,400 people at dire risk of losing their homes should not have been given their mortgages as they had no hope of repaying them, mortgage experts said. These bad lending decision

The fall in house prices left many homeowners in negative equity, but this need not necessarily prevent you from trading up... IT'S the topic no one wants to talk about, but this elephant has no plans to leave the room. Negative equity happens when the value of your property on the open market amounts to less than the sum of your mortgage. If you bought a house within the past five years, you are likely to be in negative equity to some degree. The average household is sitting on negative equity estimated at €43,000, according to Irish Independent calculations based on a recent report by Goodbody Stockbrokers. It was estimated that 116,000 households were in negative equity at the end of 2009, rising to nearly 200,000 by the end of this year, according to the Economic and Social Research Institute. However, this is a conservative estimate based on prices falling by 24pc from their peak in 2007. If house prices end up falling by 50pc, this figure would rise to 350,000. It is general

Economic downturn wipes 50pc off value of homes... LARGE detached family homes in the capital have halved in value in the downturn. Estate agents admit four- and five-bedroom detached properties in Dublin are now only fetching 50pc of their 2007 prices. This means upwardly-mobile couples who shelled out an average of €1m at the height of the boom years are now sitting in a house worth just €500,000. The Irish Auctioneers and Valuers Institute (IAVI), which represents auctioneers around the country, says that houses nationally are now worth 40pc less than at the peak. Connacht has seen the smallest drop in house prices but even these are dramatic. The average two-bedroom townhouse in the region has fallen in value by 27.7pc. Things are much worse in Dublin for struggling homeowners who are seeing themselves plunged further into negative equity as prices have plummeted by half. But this is all good news for buyers with cash today. The IAVI annual property survey released shows that new t

The average Dublin house price is now €242,000 according to the latest Daft report... ASKING prices for residential property around the country fell by 19 per cent during 2009 and are now nationally 30 per cent below asking levels in early 2007, according to Daft’s latest house price report published today. The national average asking price for residential property at the end of 2009 was €242,000 – a fall of €107,000 from the peak in early 2007. In Dublin, asking prices have dropped by up to 42 per cent since the peak says the report. Earlier this week the country ’s largest estate agency chain, Sherry FitzGerald, said that house prices had dropped 20.3 per cent nationally in 2009, and in Dublin, had fallen in real terms by 45.7 per cent since 2006. Commenting on the link between price falls and movement on the market, Daft economist Ronan Lyons says that while Dublin saw the largest fall in house prices in 2009 “the total stock for sale in the capital fell by almost 20 per cent over

Time to raze the unfinished relics of the building boom... Ireland is about to witness a US-style degeneration of half- built housing schemes into ghost estates, says Juno McEnroe. FORMER US President Thomas Jefferson once said that small landholders are the most precious part of a state. In Ireland this phrase rang true during the boom with the first-time buyers and start-up investors who were encouraged to throw their cash into property. At one stage the property and construction sector made up over 20% of Government income. A precious pot for the State indeed. But just as Jefferson’s ideology of giving tracts of land to ordinary US citizens ended up benefiting greedy speculators, Ireland’s property investment schemes during the boom saw towns ravaged by sprawl, over-development and a plethora of ‘phantom’ or ‘ghost estates’ that now look unlikely ever to be finished . So it now looks as though the landholders will be the most worthless, or even the costliest, part of our esteemed st

1,500 homeowners a month seek state aid on mortgages MORE than 1,500 applications for mortgage interest supplements are being lodged by struggling home owners every month, it has emerged. As a result, community welfare officers administering the scheme for borrowers are being overstretched as demand for the state-paid mortgage assistance rises. The number in receipt of Mortgage Interest Supplement has shot up by 260% since the height of the boom. At the end of November 2009, 17,500 Mortgage Interest Supplement claims had been lodged for the whole year. Up to 12,800 claims were granted during the same period. Recipient numbers have escalated since the boom, rising 260% since the end of 2007 when the total number of recipients was 4,111. A private report for a section of the Department of Social and Family Affairs, which oversees the scheme, reveals the concern by community welfare officers over the mortgage arrears crisis. The report, obtained by the Irish Examiner, puts the debt crisis

OPINION : By 2015, Iceland will almost certainly be a lot better off than Ireland because it dealt decisively with its banks ... WHILE THINGS are hard to predict, the future, especially the situation of the Irish economy, is so stark that even an economist can make some predictions that stand a chance of being right. Two ghosts of Christmas will haunt Ireland in 2015: jobs and debt. For 20 years, the Irish economy experienced extraordinary growth. Unfortunately, this growth came from two separate booms that merged imperceptibly into each other. First we had real growth in the 1990s, driven by rising competitiveness and exports. However, after 2000 competitiveness collapsed, and growth came to be driven by a lending bubble without equal in the euro zone. As Michael Hennigan of Finfacts (www.finfacts.ie) has pointed out, of the half million jobs created in the last decade, only 4,000 were in exporting firms; and fewer people now work in IDA-supported companies than in 2000. The Irish eco