Category: Prices

Fitch Report: Property Markets Remain Soft, Irish Borrowers on Strike

Post author By Gregory Connor
Post date January 9, 2013

Namawinelake has a link to the new Fitch report on global property markets, including Ireland which gets considerable attention in the report. The Irish picture is mixed with some positive signals (affordability ratios have become more normal) and other negative signals (continued bank distress limits future mortgage lending).

Fitch also highlights the unusual behaviour of Irish arrears, and connects this to the Irish policy framework.

“Irish Borrowers on Strike: Despite economic stabilisation, Irish arrears continue to trend upwards. Fitch believes this to be partially driven by policy framework changes. Lenders are constrained from large-scale repossessions, dis-incentivising borrowers from paying their mortgages. In addition, borrowers in arrears are also likely to benefit from significant debt write-offs when personal insolvency legislation becomes effective.”

We’re different, roysh? The decoupling of the Dublin property market

Post author By Ronan Lyons
Post date July 2, 2012

Today sees the launch of the fiftieth Daft Report, with a commentary by yours truly. To mark the occasion, and to mark five years of Ireland’s property market crash, Daft.ie and the All-Island Research Observatory at NUI Maynooth, have launched a property value heatmap tool. In a companion post to this one, I outline the tool, how it works and what it tells us about Ireland’s property market crash.

In this post, though, I’d like to highlight what’s in the report itself. The principal finding from Q2 was that conditions in the Dublin market do indeed look to have improved considerably since the start of the year. This has happened at a time when conditions elsewhere in the country are pretty much unchanged. It seems the decoupling of the Dublin property market from the rest of the country has already begun.

Get them while they’re hot (or cold): Heatmaps of property values in Ireland now available

Post author By Ronan Lyons
Post date July 2, 2012

As I note in the companion post to this one, today sees the launch of the fiftieth Daft Report, with a commentary by yours truly. To mark the occasion, and to mark five years of Ireland’s property market crash, Daft.ie and the All-Island Research Observatory at NUI Maynooth, have launched a property value heatmap tool. In this post, I’ll give an outline of what the tool is and does, and what we can learn from it.

Nama Scheme Increases Recorded Property Sales Prices by Approximately 7.5%

Post author By Gregory Connor
Post date May 9, 2012

In announcing its 80/20 negative equity insurance scheme, Nama management could have, but did not, provide estimates of the implicit cost of the insurance component of the package product. The cost is hidden in the package sales prices, which Nama management describe as “fair value prices” for the property. With a bit of work, it is possible to reverse-engineer the insurance-component cost from the scanty information provided by Nama.

Nama giving away “free” insurance, thereby distorting both its published accounts and Irish property market prices

Post author By Gregory Connor
Post date May 8, 2012

I have written about this before, twice, but now some more details have emerged and the Nama scheme has gone live. Nama has announced that it will providing “free” insurance against price falls for selected properties, in order to help sell its Irish residential property portfolio.

From the information provided, it seems Nama will hide the insurance premium in the recorded property sales price, thereby simultaneously distorting Nama’s published accounts, CSO property sales price statistics, and the soon-to-be-released property price sales registry.

Wonkish paragraph: Hiding the insurance premium in this way also has a knock-on effect on the “moneyness” of the embedded option. Since the actual sales price includes a hidden insurance premium, and the eventual valuation of the property (used to determine the insurance pay-out) does not include any insurance premium, the insurance scheme is immediately “in the red” as soon as the property is sold. Nama has to hope for price increases, not just the absence of decreases, in order to claw back the embedded insurance premium which is hidden in the distorted sales price. This knock-on effect can be quite substantial.