Pat Kenny spoke to us about the issue of housing, he also had Fintan MacNamara from the landlords association on the show to look at the issues from the landlord perspective. There was a lot of consensus but some disagreement in particular about how special treatment should or shouldn’t be given to the property sector.
Matt Cooper had Karl Deeter (Irish Mortgage Brokers) and Tom Lyons (Sunday Business Post) on his show to discuss recent developments in housing and how rents are rapidly rising. The focus was very much solutions oriented and some interesting thoughts came out of the conversation, in particular on the area of accountability.
Antoin Murphy was and remains one of the most fascinating economic historians in Ireland, his work on John Law is internationally recognized as being the best there is. Here is a paper he did on how Ireland operated without banks, it is a must read for anybody who wants to know more on how the world can work without banks (in a paper oriented system).
Antoin Murphy, Money in an economy without banks, The case of Ireland – bank strike paper
We were on Today FM to talk about comments made by the Taoiseach regarding how people come up with money for a deposit to buy a home. While many were finding it a source of outrage, we were making the point that it’s incredibly common and that it actually is a normal occurrence albeit not ‘the norm’ for everybody (because nothing is universal).
This is a good discussion because in our view it shows the way that housing shortages can turn into all manner of talking point arguments, we don’t think it’s realistic to tell parents you can’t help your kids or to say that it’s wrong in any way, but we do agree with Sinead from TheJournal that we have a housing shortage and that this is really where the problem lies.
We were pleased to feature on RTE 6 O’Clock news where John Kilraine spoke to Karl Deeter about the new Government mortgage scheme. Our view is that we broadly welcome it but that it would be far better to get the cost of housing down rather than to make high prices affordable with cheaper credit.
This was an article where we showed people how they could take advantage of a bank by accepting their cashback offer then doing the same thing again at a later date with another bank. While we don’t encourage or say this is the way to do things, we are simply pointing out that consumers can take advantage of banks if they want. Link to original is here.
We spoke to Ciara Kelly about the issue of ‘fake bids’ and whether they exist or not. We believe they do but not that they are widespread. The more concerning issue is around the bid that gets accepted because the true conflict of interest would be where a buyer pays an agent to ensure they are the ‘winning bid’, again, this is not widespread but there are enough stories in circulation to believe that it has occurred. The best solution around this is to ensure people register their bids publicly, this would stop most of the chicanery (where it exists) and could even be a form of additional income to the property regulator and an estate agent if there was a fee involved for doing so.
We spoke to Mary Wilson on RTE’s ‘Drivetime’ show about the ESRI Report which stated that property prices would continue to rise for several more years into the future. We know of no significant measure that will reduce the upward momentum of prices at present. In a worrying sense you also don’t see any yield compression – that means that as prices are rising so are yields, this typically indicates a normal relationship with prices and yields (in a bubble yields often drop as the toppy capital prices far outweigh yields).
We spoke to Ciara Kelly about the current property market and where we believe we are in the cycle. She was surprised to hear us say that we believed a crash was virtually an inevitability. There are myriad reason for property cycles and the routes to resolving them are politically unacceptable, for that reason we are confident we won’t avoid experiencing another one.
This is our article that appeared in the Sunday Independent when Karl Deeter was covering a column for Charlie Weston on the 5th of November.
We need to speak to banks in the language they understand, not the language they ‘tell us’ they understand, but the actual language they speak. That language is the language of money.
The ongoing tracker scandal doesn’t cover many of the mortgage holders who lost trackers – many banks took them away from landlords as a part of granting them longer interest-only periods and with some of the biggest institutions these borrowers aren’t covered.
While some may have a hard time feeling pity for landlords, I would remind them that you can’t delight in their financial pain then scratch your head when they jack up rents and squeeze tenants for all they can in order to pay the new higher cost of lending.
Banks are as big a cost to this country as many aspects of public health, we spent more bailing out banks than we did on curing cancer in the last eight years.
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