AIB Rate hike: where is it now and where is it going?

AIB have announced an increase in their Standard Variable Rates (SVR’s) as well as in their Loan to Value Standard Variables (LTV-SVR’s: which are tiered variables based upon your loan to value), effective from August 10th. Caroline Madden of the Irish Times and Charlie Weston from the Independent both carried the story today, this comes only days after Allied Irish Bank announced that they lost over €2,000,000,000 in the first half of 2010.

Their SVR now stands at 3.25% but where is it headed? For that it is important to look at several different factors, firstly, their cost to income ratio has gone from 48% in 2009 to 63% for 2010. That means that it is costing them €63 to turn over €100 in income, this is a 32% increase on last year in costs which is a bad indication.

There are a multitude of factors playing into this:

1. Guarantee/ELG costs: …

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Rent to Buy, why?

I had dinner in early 2008 with a man who was a retired builder, he told me about the way he used to do business back in the 70’s, and he told me ‘you wait and watch! It’ll be happening that way again!’, he was right, although at the time I didn’t realise that.

He said that back in the 70’s when people came to see his houses they’d say ‘how much is it?’, and he might say ‘£12,000’ to which they invariably said ‘we can’t afford that!’, and his approach was this – ‘what can you afford?’. He would then negotiate a deal with the buyer based on renting out the property with a view to buying or letting them have the property and paying him directly without having to go down the route of standard mortgages etc. and it worked, he was successful through the 70’s and 80’s and he retired in the mid-90’s before (as he said) ‘the real fun began’.

The point about this is that being able to work …

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