Covid-19’s impact on mortgages

The covid-19 pandemic has had a massive impact on all areas of the financial world, including banks, loans, and mortgages. Mortgage arrears, or payments failed to be made by their original specified due date, had been consistently falling every year since 2013. However, Fitch predicts that arrears of at least 90 days will constitute about 14-16% of Irish home loans this year, their highest rate since the financial crisis.

Additionally, the pandemic has led to widespread payment breaks for mortgages in Ireland. Payment breaks involve the deferring of repayment of a loan to a later date; they do not change, however, reduce the total amount to be paid. In March of last year, the major banks in Ireland agreed to industry-wide payment breaks for those facing financial hardship as a result of the pandemic. This was done out of consideration for borrowers’ situations and lenders’ own desire to avoid high default rates. Ultimately, by May 2020, one in nine owner-occupier mortgage payments was on such a break.

Though this measure was taken of the industry’s own volition, soon after, the …

Read More →

Dublin Rent prices on office apartments have fallen since the beginning of the pandemic

In the past year, we’ve seen the Dublin office market prices in rent fall to the lowest they’ve been since 2016. The COVID pandemic has caused the economy to slow to a standstill, and with that, the majority of such companies are postponing their long term executive decisions due to the uncertainty the pandemic has brought about. Office rents have fallen from the high of €65 per square foot down to €59 near the end of 2020.

Even so, there have been signs of economic recovery near the end of the last quarter of 2020. This is expected to grow and continue as the vaccinations for the virus begin to become publicly accessible to the general public. The vacancy rate in the Dublin offices ended at around 9.5% due to reduced demand and office hours during the pandemic. This grey space comes into the market and accounts for nearly 25% of the available office space in the capital. These spaces are continuing to compete with traditional landlords as they offer more flexible terms of lend to their customers. There have …

Read More →

Remove the lending limits to aid economic recovery? They’re considering it in New Zealand.

The Royal Bank of New Zealand (their central bank) is considering the removal of the lending limits – similar to our own – because it’s a countercyclical tool that is no longer needed.

“More recently we have proposed removing mortgage loan-to-value ratio (LVR) restrictions, as this is a countercyclical tool and we have been able to consider lowering this now that the risks of excessive lending have subsided and banks can now lean into a recovery. This should also enable banks to support customer needs”

That spells it out fairly loud and clear, if the tool isn’t needed then why deploy it? At the moment we are seeing massive issues with sales due to banks restricting in order to comply with the lending rules, this is an unforeseen consequence that will damage certain borrowers who have entered into contracts in good faith.

It’s worth noting that we took our lead in part from New Zealand on the lending rules, our new Governor is from there and house prices in New Zealand are also high – …

Read More →

The Last Word on Today FM: What about property prices after covid19?

We were guests on Matt Cooper’s ‘The Last Word’ show on Today FM along with Marian Finnegan the MD of SherryFitzgerald’s residential business to discuss the residential property market and how it might work out in the wake of the covid19 pandemic.

Marian gave good analysis as you’d expect, Karl was pointing out that supply shortages would persist despite any changes that may occur in prices, the reasons for this being that the dynamics that existed prior to it hadn’t changed.

The full clip of the piece is below.

Read More →

Property prices after Covid19

We did a piece with Pat Kenny on his Newstalk radio show yesterday. We talked about the reasons for why property prices may face a short term volatility but that when balanced against housing need in general that the pandemic will not make housing more affordable in the long term. For that to happen we need many other things to start to resolve such as land prices, non-construction costs and planning timelines.

Read More →

Help To Buy For First Time Buyers

The name provides a definition for itself. First time home buyers are people in the market buying a home for the first time. Compared to other home buyers, such as trader-up borrowers and mortgage switchers, first time buyers have different benefits and restrictions when borrowing than other borrowers. The Central Bank of Ireland requires a 10% down payment for first time buyers. Now, for first time buyers, a 45,000 euro down payment for a 450,000 euro home may be somewhat daunting. However, the Central Bank has offered assistance for their first time buyers to keep them in the market. The Central Bank offers a help to buy program. This benefit allows for first time buyers of new houses and apartments to take a 5% tax rebate off of properties less than 500,000 euros. In a recent case at Irish Mortgage Brokers, a married couple came looking for a mortgage on their first home. The couple did not have a home in mind at the time, but based on their income, the couple had roughly below 500k to spend. Both individuals …

Read More →

Dortmund Property Market – areas, prices and average costs

Areas and Districts

The city of Dortmund is divided into twelve distinct districts. All city districts are then subdivided into a total of 62 statistical districts. Some of main, more well known districts include Downtown-West, Downtown-North, Downtown-East, Eving, Scharnhorst, Brackel, Aplerbeck, Hörde, Hombruch, Lütgendortmund, Huckarde and Mengede. 

Price fundamentals

Housing prices in Dortmund depend greatly on a number of factors, not unlike any other city. As any good realtor will tell you, pricing is mainly contingent on location. After that buys and sellers look for things such as year of construction, the condition of the property, living space, date of last modernization, final energy requirement (e.g. quality of insulation), surroundings, neighbourhood, car parking spaces or garages and much more. For this reason the following information may differ.

Development of prices / rents

The Empirica Price Database and others form the basis for the following comments on the property price development in Dortmund:

Depending on location, interior or other criteria from above, the current rent for an apartment in Dortmund are somewhere in between 7 € and 12 € per square …

Read More →

Inflation Rates Return to Normal

 

The current housing prices in Dublin have been talked about extensively recently. The newest trend shows that housing prices have reached peak affordability and now some of the wealthy classes of people are having trouble affording homes. Current house prices in Dublin are more than nine times the average salary making them unattainable for the majority of people because mortgages can only be 3.5 times your salary. Additionally, these numbers have not been seen since the Celtic Tiger Era, however, the central bank has been more careful this time and increased borrowing rules unlike during the Celtic Tiger Era. Prices are now beginning to slow down because simply nobody is able to afford them.

Inflation has also cooled off recently with a decrease from 12.4% last May to 2.8% a year later. Dublin has seen a significantly smaller inflation rate with an increase of prices from the current year to May of .6%.

The region of Dublin had the highest median price of 366,000 Euros which is just over 9 times more than its average salary of 40,000 Euros. …

Read More →
  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. 4
  6. 5
  7. 6
  8. 7
  9. ...
  10. 37