The big switch

The time is coming near where One Big Switch say they will be shaking up the mortgage market in Ireland by using the power of group persuasion to get a bank to make an offer that is lower than that which is currently available.

Is this likely to succeed? In particular given that even the Central Bank and Government have failed when it comes to demanding that banks lower their rates?

We would think ‘yes’, because this campaign speaks to banks in the language they understand most, that of customers and money. With loan growth becoming much slower and aggregate credit continuously shrinking for the last eight years, it means that banks don’t have a large amount of choices for new business.

Attrition will be part of the plan and it isn’t one shackled by the Central Bank lending rules because they don’t apply to switcher loans where there is not a top up element to the loan. This means you take a proven credit track record and equity in the property and you obtain what we refer to as …

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Sunday Business Post: More haste less speed in the mortgage crisis

Angela Keegan of MyHome.ie wrote an opinion piece in the Sunday Business Post yesterday which included some of our firms commentary:

Figures compiled by Karl Deeter at Irish Mortgage Brokers showed that the size of the average first-time buyer mortgage peaked in the first quarter of 2008, at €251,000.

At the moment, the average drawdown is €188,000. According to Deeter, the ‘average mortgage’ from 2008 on a 2.1 per cent tracker costs €1,076 per month. Current TRS is €80 per month, so the net cost is €996.With the new, bigger TRS in the Programme for Government, the TRS will now be €119, resulting in a monthly payment of €957, an extra saving of €39 per month.

Compare that to the new first-time buyers, who will miss out on TRS. If they take out a loan for €188,000 at 4.3 per cent variable, their cost per month is €1,023.With rates likely to push up over 5 per cent, irrespective of the ECB, Deeter believes that, by this time next year, the divergence between the two mortgages could be as much as …

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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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Best Mortgage Rates February 2010

There is increased coverage of mortgages in the press of late in particular in the area of fixing or staying on a variable, below are the best rates available on the market by class of product.

Best Variable Rate with an LTV Restriction:   2.25% Best Variable Rate with no LTV Restriction:   2.55% Best 1yr Fixed Rate:   2.35% Best 2yr Fixed Rate:   2.65% Best 3yr Fixed Rate:   3.15% Best 5yr Fixed Rate:   3.7% Best 10yr Fixed Rate:  4.5%

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Failed regulation in the Irish market

There are three broad benefits to regulation of a financial system.

Firstly, avoidance of negative externalities, often the societal costs of these outweighs the private cost and prevention is possible when a regulator is function well and doing their job correctly. They do this by preventing excesses, by promoting conservative risk management in the financial sector and helping to maintain confidence by ensuring (for instance) that a liquidity shortfall in one institution doesn’t spill over into others (i.e. avoiding multiple bank runs which take down well functioning solvent banks in their wake) resulting in a widespread credit crunch.

Secondly, to set solvency and reserve requirements for banks, at times there are significant asymmetries in information within the consumer/institution relationship, or worse still, information gaps (where both institution and consumer don’t have full information – as happened in the sub-prime loan market in the USA), when nobody can determine the quality and reliability of a financial product a strong regulatory environment will ensure that banks are in a position in which they can …

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How many kicks can a broker take?!

How many kicks can a broker take before rolling over and crying ‘uncle!’. A whole bunch it seems.

Today AIB informed the intermediary market that they were capping commissions at €1,500 per loan as a maximum irrespective of the loan size. We feel that banks reward people unfairly and in a ridiculous short-term manner, AIB are no different but they are doing so at the detriment of brokerage.

I’ll qualify that: currently, broker distributed loans are highly profitable for AIB, they don’t have to pay for broker overhead, branch costs etc. I have it on good authority that they have explained this to broker representation bodies in the past, so why curtail any money a broker might make? (As if the current market wasn’t making it hard enough already!).

Simple, because it means you have more money to keep branch distribution alive, and in order to support unprofitable branches you have to find excess profit elsewhere, one of the soft targets is …

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Hedgefunds, risk, and finding the silver lining of any dark cloud.

Here is a simple question: ‘how do you protect or even augment your portfolio returns when markets are crashing or where there is systemic risk?’ if you have an answer then you can be a little smug because the majority of fund managers, the best and brightest the world of finance has to offer, for the most part didn’t have an answer during the last two years and if they did they didn’t (by and large) act upon it.

The classic definition of a hedgefund is not the ponzi-schemes run by the likes of Bernie Madoff, rather it was a fund that strategically goes long and short to produce positive gains regardless of whether the market goes up or down, that was what Winslow Jones was doing when he started the first hedge fund in 1949, while managed fund managers are happy to post a 20% loss when the averaage is -30% (for instance), hedgefund managers are meant to be able to …

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The Criteria Crunch

We have just been informed that one the lenders we deal with are only getting through applications received by the 4th of March, that is a near 20 day delay on new applications they are considering. Why the backlog? Has the market suddenly recovered? Are they being flooded?

No, rather it is a case that in banks nearly everybody has been enlisted to work in ‘collections’ and the staff were taken from every other department, in particular the ‘new business’ section. The bank we are talking about today merged their direct channel with brokerage so even going via a branch makes no difference, the whole company has only four working underwriters.

So inasmuch as the credit explosion saw too many resources being thrown at lending and the expansion of same, the crunch is doing the exact opposite by overshooting the mark in the reduction of resources. For a publicly quoted bank to be 20 days behind means that the market is facing yet another hurdle in reaching its rational level. Lending hasn’t frozen, people are …

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Valuations in property are currently meaningless

Free markets, or indeed markets in general, have a tendency to set prices, not through control, not by one person holding up a placard and shouting from the rooftops, but rather through the process of prices reaching a point at where they occur, where demand and supply are reacting with each other.

So if you look for €3 million for a three bed semi in Donnycarney your property will not sell, no matter how much you want it to. At the same time, if you were to list a property there for €50,000 it would sell overnight, and both of these extremes demonstrate a pricing being totally out of balance with the market. The interesting point now though is this: The market itself doesn’t know what is happening, so valuations are currently meaningless. By that I mean the people who go out and value property are not able to make accurate assumptions about property prices in this market, we are seeing this daily, and then dealing with the end result which is …

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