Current public sentiment towards the housing market?

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Not without the country grinding to a halt as a result of mass strikes. There will be a rise in income taxes before there will be large scale layoffs of civil servants.

The ridiculous benchmarking may be thrown out the window though.
 
room305 said:
Not without the country grinding to a halt as a result of mass strikes. There will be a rise in income taxes before there will be large scale layoffs of civil servants.
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You know, for the first time in my life, I am seriously considering emigration. Madness.
 
tententwenty said:
You know, for the first time in my life, I am seriously considering emigration. Madness.
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I cant believe when people say this, a lot of people seem to suggest they will emigrate if times get tough. I just wonder what are peoples values these days, is money and financial health highest on the list of values?

Personally, I value many other things than money and if I was to emigrate I would be leaving them all behind. No thanks.

I suppose this is "askaboutmoney" so what can you expect?
 
True. But I have serious objections to my tax money being used to inflate a civil service that, it seems, cannot be removed or reduced without bringing the country to a crashing halt. Especially given that my experiences with these civil servants have been less than positive, as well as all sorts of stories about people sitting at their desks pushing paper around 10 to 4, who can't be fired. Better to put my money somewhere its not lining some lazy beaurocrat's pocket, maybe. And increasing income tax for that purpose. Nah, seeya.

Anyway, this is all wildly off topic, sorry, carry on!
 

As opposed to people sitting at their desks, pretending to work, while really posting on the current public sentiment..on AAM??
 
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Penthouses in Santry look like they're being hit hard - ongoing price drops:

This one has dropped from €525,000 to €450,000

Old listing - €525,000:


New listing : €450,000:
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Interestingly, it's very similar to the one that Cecelia Ahern had trouble selling earlier in the year!
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There are a lot of apartments that have been for sale in Santry for a long time - I wonder how long they can stay on the market before prices fall further.
 

People were only buying these places because they were going up in value. They stop going up in value and the buyers drift away. Prices will coast down until these flats look like value for money, and that's value for money a year or three from now.
 
"Penthouse in Santry" sound ridiculous ...like "Exclusive Development in Sallynoggin" sounds ridiculous
 
it did earlier and the page was from daft with teh asking just like WH said

caches are funny, eh !
 
And they said it could never happen in Ballsbridge, the heart of D4....

Asking price drop from €635,000 down to €600,000

New listing €600,000:
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Original Listing €635,000 (second one in the list)


It really hurts for a vendor to lower their asking price - I haven't seen asking price drops on a scale like this since property prices fell in 2001. I'm only posting this one to prove that it's also happening in D4 but asking prices are dropping in most areas of Dublin. If the price on a property was too high, over the past few years the rising market used to take care of it. Now they just sit on the market until the vendor capitulates and drops the asking price.
 

interesting point, but you're forgetting the large-scale emigration we had back then, which kept the unemployment rate lower than it could have been.
And also, as another poster mentioned, a state job did offer considerable protection. Out in the private sector, like today, the same job security wasn't there. If you lost your job, you had to compete with the 10% of unemployed people + the 65,000 young people leaving school every year also looking for a job.
Materially we're far better off now, but there have been huge trade-offs - high property prices, longer commutes, 2 parents working (not out of choice).
But would you really want to go back to the 80's?
 
These two recent examples should be a reminder to all sellers out there. If you are selling your property, you have to stage it, or a least put some nice furnature in it.
 

Unemployment was closer to 17% if I recall correctly, even allowing for an exodus of between 50-80 thousand people every year. On the other hand, that dose of reality would affect the way you live your life in terms of how you manage money, how you view the future. There's a generation of people in Ireland who have no concept of how bad times can be. And some of them have huge credit card debts and a lot of them are mortgaged up to the hilt in new starter homes which are, very frequently, tiny one bedroomed apartments.

That being said, we didn't have to trade off in that way. We created - ourselves - the high property prices by being willing -collectively - to endebt ourselves. It wasn't because we had more money that property prices went up - it was because we were willing to pay those prices. We bought into them because collectively (there were individuals who didn't agree) we convinced ourselves that you could never lose on property. That's not really a function of being materially well off, it's a function of not being intelligent about your money. There are some who'd say "well look how well people did for the last six years" and to them I would say that that will be offset by how badly people will do when the correction does come. Balanced sensible growth is far more sustainable than rampant growth followed by a sharp correction. Living the wanting to get rich quickly lifestyle brings with it the risk of getting poor quickly as well. Unfortunately a lot of people buying property in this country aren't all that clear on that front.

Personally, given a choice between Duran Duran and Britney, I'd choose Duran Duran, but not at the price of no internet. But that's my call.

Just one last thing - people have always bought houses and all those houses were not bought by state employees. Most of the most massive mortgages I see being taken out are not being taken out by state employees. Certainly a state job may be a good long term bet, but not all state employees earn enough to buy a house.

But then, I wonder who does given that the average salary is X and the average house price is between 9 and 12 times X depending on whose house price surveys you read, and up to 16 times X in Dublin, again depending on whose price surveys you read.
 
One of the points that I'd value opinions on from potential purchasers is:

You are in the market for property. You feel it represents bad value for money. Which would you prefer - the vendor to do upgrade works costing X amount of money, or the vendor to knock X amount of money off the asking price?

I'm leaning towards the discount. Part of the reason I might be more tempted by an ex-investment property is that there is less of a former owner's personality to stamp out of it.

I'm just interested because by and large, we're hitting a point where asking prices are starting to slide, anecdotally at least, and this has, in the past, brought about a situation whereby people do some work on a house to make it more attractive, when, perhaps it would be directly cheaper to them (in terms of selling faster and not getting caught for mortgage interest, for example) to discount the house.
 
whathome said:
If the price on a property was too high, over the past few years the rising market used to take care of it. Now they just sit on the market until the vendor capitulates and drops the asking price.
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A good sign that we may have hit the top of the market. The amount of talk from REAs about how things will pick up "when the buying season kicks in" and talk in the press of people holding off on selling until it does, leads me to believe that there will simply be too much of an oversupply for "buying season" to ever really kick in.

The only thing that could bolster the market now is an early pause of ECB rate rises - on the back of the Fed starting to slash rates to try and inflate their way out of the coming recession. If they pause, it may give a kick to the market. There may even be talk of the ECB starting to cut rates in tandem with the Fed (although I will be surprised if it actually does happen). This talk could see buyers emerging from the sidelines, hoping to buy "before prices start rising again".
 
room305 said:
There may even be talk of the ECB starting to cut rates in tandem with the Fed (although I will be surprised if it actually does happen). This talk could see buyers emerging from the sidelines, hoping to buy "before prices start rising again".
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Very surprised I'd say - Having just established their inflation-fighting credentials the ECB can't change direction until inflation is well under control.
Also, I heard from EAs that new developments coming to market this season are being far less aggressively priced than they had previously intended. If it's true it could mean that yer man who bought most of Ballsbridge will have to build much more than originally thought to make his money back!
 
whathome said:
They are unlikely to pause - looks like two more ECB interest rate rises by December this year - taking us to 3.5%
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I meant a pause after they hit 3.5%. It's not impossible. The US economy is tanking faster than anyone expected and although inflation risks remain, given a choice I'm betting the Fed will choose inflation over recession (initially at least). It will be hard for the ECB to keep raising when the Fed is cutting because the dollar will fall so sharply against the euro that it will severely hurt exports. If they can avoid it, I would say they will not cut rates but they may pause.

Alternatively, if Bernanke turns hawkish and start raising rates again leading the US into a recession (or even slowed growth), the price of commodities will tumble and this will give the ECB reason to pause.

I'm not saying anyone should buy a house (indeed I'm selling mine) but it's worth considering things from several angles. However, this is probably temporary and at some stage the Fed will have to hike rates even higher than they are now or kiss goodbye to the dollar.
 
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