Brian Finn of RTE’s Business News spoke to Karl Deeter on Morning Ireland’s business news. He asked how the new changes to bankruptcy legislation would affect both borrowers and the property market.
RTE 6 News: Property prices
In this piece covering property prices, the increases in Dublin and the situation around the rest of the country we gave a brief comment highlighting that for the first time outside of Dublin there was a year on year sign of stabilisation in prices. Paul Murphy gave some excellent analysis on the topic.
TV3 Midweek: Discussing property with Colette Fitzpatrick
Colette Fitzpatrick had Fiona McLoughlan-Healy and Karl Deeter in the studio to discuss property prices and what the implications were for the market in both Dublin and in general as well as whether or not we are going into a new bubble.
RTE Morning Edition: 27th November 2013
We were asked to review the papers on RTE’s Morning Edition with Anthony Murnane who was sitting in for Keelin Shanley.
Don’t be late! Banks announcing cut off dates for mortgage cheques
Every year Santa brings a few unlucky kids some coal, the banks have a similar deal for people who are late with their paperwork and it’s called a ‘cut off date’.
This means that irrespective of what you do, you won’t be able to get a mortgage cheque if you submit paperwork after a certain date (we’ll list them as they come in). The problem for some people is that they might be reliant on closing in 2013 in order to get a legal property tax avoidance for owner occupiers so if you are going to try to draw down in December do yourself a favour and get everything sorted out ASAP.
And also remember, by ‘documents in’ that means ‘on the system’ and from the time a document arrives to when it gets scanned up can take a few days depending on the institution.
Cut off dates announced thus far:
BOI and ICS: Tuesday 17th
KBC: Friday 20th
(edit: 28/11/13 10:51am)
AIB/Haven: Monday 16th
Watch what you say (on social media) the banks are listening
Something that has been a trend for quite some time is that various people are looking at your social media, not with a view to laughing at a funny picture, but as a way to helping them make a commercial decision.
The employers looking at facebook and the like is well known, but what a lot of people don’t realise is that if you apply for a loan more often than not the bank is going to check you out on various social media platforms.
The most common is linked in. While a bank can verify your work history to the extent that your current employer provides it on a salary cert (duration of tenure, pay etc.) it tells them almost nothing about your past work history on how you got to that point in your life.
So if you have big gaps where you have no explanation it could sway a decision, if you mention how you always wanted to leave the corporate world and work for charity it could sway a decision and if you spent your career …
Repossessions you don’t even know about (when it’s you that it happens to)
We have a client who just found out one of their properties is getting repossessed. The only odd thing about it is that the bank never bothered to tell them about it. Instead it was found out when a neighbour told one of their relatives who then mentioned it to them etc. etc.
Anyway, the property in question has been lying idle and we are trying to determine if the papers were served at all and if so to what address because at present there is an estate agent sign in the garden and according to them this was all done correctly and paperwork is in order.
Seems awful strange, and the client said that Ulsterbank (the lender in question) haven’t called them in several months. It seems they are sick of talk perhaps, but even so, if they are going to repossess a property you’d think you’d get at least a farewell card or something?
Don’t pay the investment mortgage, just pay us
Something that is often overlooked when people hear mortgage statistics is the various shenanigans that are going on underneath the headline figures. For instance, people are often asked to stop paying investment mortgages and to divert the rent to the family home. This is one creditor playing hard-ball with the borrower at the expense of another creditor.
While it does make sense to prioritise your family home, there is also the issue of wondering why the rent shouldn’t go to the investment loan provider given that it is generated from the asset they backed? Clearly this is a judgement call, but when the family home lender is effectively asking for that income then it strays into the area of being an ethical one as well.
The letter to the left is one such example, while it doesn’t state ‘shaft the investment loan provider’ as clear as you might expect, it was the basics of what the borrower was told to do.
They use a bankers vernacular which says ‘we won’t …
TV3 News with Sinead O’Donnell on the surprise ECB rate cut
We were asked about the likelihood of banks passing on yesterdays rate cut to standard variable rate mortgage holders, we don’t think they will.
Deise AM: Billy and Karl on people paying mortgages into their 70′s
We discussed the research that showed people expect to be paying mortgages into their 70′s.