Irish Mortgage Brokers at the inaugural Euromoney Conference

The EuroMoney conference was held for the firs time in Dublin last week and opened by the Minister of Finance Michael Noonan. It had a great line up of speakers including several CEO’s of our largest financial institutions and was an opportunity for professional practitioners to discuss recent developments and many aspects of the market in general.

Karl Deeter was there to represent Irish Mortgage Broker and to take part in the panel discussion on property.

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LMFM 25th July 2013, Karl talks to Deirdre about property prices, cycles and banks

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Housing slump over?

Charlie Weston ran a story about an S&P report in the Independent stating that the housing slump is over. The thrust of it is that house prices are reasonable compared with wages and rents but that recovery is still some way off.

There are different interpretations of recovery, some people say stability is recovery or that it can be counted in terms of transactions, personally I think that rising prices is part of the definition, otherwise you simply have stagnation with more transactions which is a dynamic that tends not to last.

Our belief remains as it has for many years, the property market is a boom bust prone area with a cycle that lasts between 18 and 20 years. This leads to structural issues that repeat themselves every time and despite the pattern being known nobody has ever rectified it.

S&P say that reduced mortgage lending is holding the market back, if this is true it is surprising that banks don’t find some way to ramp up lending as it would reduce their capital …

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The market will flatline then recover.

(This article originally appeared in the Sunday Independent)

The Irish property market appears to be out of palliative care and perhaps somewhere between the ICU and recovery ward. If the historical property cycle which we don’t often discuss in Ireland holds true then we should see prices become static then within two years start to rise swiftly.

Obviously there are problems, the combined forces of high unemployment, massive oversupply in many counties, and stock mismatch (apartments for sale when people want standard housing), you could add to that list of negatives almost indefinitely.

Whether you are a fan or detractor, a healthy economy has a healthy property and construction aspect to it and there is no doubt anywhere that ours is in ill health, the National Bureau of Economic Research (USA) paper ‘The housing cycle is the business cycle’ paper is worth reading for anybody who thinks we don’t need property and construction in good order to recover.

The list of positives is smaller, but compelling, we have argued for a long time that credit and confidence are the two …

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TV3 Morning Show featureing Irish Mortgage Brokers and MyHome.ie

TV3 The Morning Show with Sybil and Martin from Irish Mortgage Brokers on Vimeo.

We were delighted to feature on TV3’s ‘Morning Show with Sybil and Martin’ on their monthly property slot alongside Angela Keegan from MyHome.ie

In the piece we discussed the property market as well as the financial side of it and how changes to both interest rates and taxation changes could affect buyers in the future.

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Fred Harrison talks about the property tax

I called Fred Harrison in connection with a book review I had done for the national broker associations magazine ‘The Professional Insurance Broker’, I wanted to send him on a copy, what was meant to be a quick hello/goodbye turned into a fascinating chat on the topic of property taxes.

Something that we are seeing more of lately is a debate where the public sector are demonized – often for merely existing – and portrayed as being ‘wasteful’ and bloated. Bob Frank in the US said something to me before that stuck in my head, that ‘the serious waste occurs in the private sector, the public sector don’t go around buying hummers and other pointless trophies, the ‘waste’ in the public sector however, is found in the way that they budget and perform versus the private sector’.

I think that is profound, the public sector don’t waste in the same manner and it is important to remember that in any …

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When will we get a real picture on repossessions in Ireland?

The mood has definitely changed in the markets and across the world in the last year, we have gone from being on the precipice of total destruction to being tentatively optimistic, and in many cases outright bullish. The news is becoming ‘less bad’ (perhaps we are getting immune to bad news too!) across several key metrics in many countries such as the ‘speed of the increase in the rate of unemployment’ – which is a roundabout way of saying ‘lots of people are losing jobs but not as quickly as before and thus its a good thing’.

One of the headline grabbers this year was that of repossessions, they make for poignant reading and often they are naturally heartbreaking stories, but are we seeing the full picture? Today we will consider some of the reasons why we believe that we are not seeing anything like the full picture, and it relates to the implementation of several key policy areas which have essentially delayed the problem for another …

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Fast Track Repossessions, what does it mean?

There has been an interesting development in the area of repossessions in recent weeks in which a property can be taken back (repossessed) without a full court procedure having taken place. Today we will consider how this will work.

First of all, there are several things which tie in together in 2009 and they form part of reason behind the new ruling. The use of circuit courts to repossess a home used to be commonplace because the decision was set in a court depending on the ‘rateable value’, but the domestic rates system was discontinued in 1978, thus, the hearings started to default into the higher echelons of judicial decision making and today the common court for repossession hearings is the High Court.

The new rule means that a Registrar will decide what is seen or not by the court and a side effect of this is that a house can be repossessed without actually going before a judge. It is important to note that a registrar is not merely a …

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