Flouting planning laws…

In today’s Independent there is an article about Ray Grehan and his ‘flouting of planning laws’. Having been through the planning process a few times I can say that it is often a frustrating exercise in which you hold an asset (the site) but are directed regarding it’s use by a third party who has little to lose based upon their recommendations which often hinge upon opinion.

In Grehan’s case he flew in the face of the planners – something which is very common in one off housing (in fact, you’ll find that every profession involved in housing knows what you can and can’t get away with), with the usual follow up of ‘retention’ being the solution.

He did the same thing many others do, fight with the local council to get planning, then build something different and try to keep it. The ratio of retention granted to that of properties that are forced to get torn down to remain compliant? I don’t know the answer, what I do know of is a long …

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Standard Financial Statement or SFS – for people in mortgage arrears

If you go into arrears on your mortgage or you talk to your lender because you believe you are a ‘pre-arrears’ candidate then you will be asked to fill in a ‘Standard Financial Statement‘ or SFS which is part of the Mortgage Arrears Resolution Process (MARP) which started last year.

Engaging with the lender is a key tenet of this and filling in the SFS and liaising with the lender on aspects of it. The information in this is what will be used to negotiate the repayment that you will pay in cases where lifestyle adjustment does not allow you to make the full payment.

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Best mortgage rates available, December 2011

This is the usual update of rates available at the moment. As you’ll notice, AIB is the leader in almost every section. However, they are not necessarily lending to every client hoping to obtain finance with them – to know if they’ll be the lender of choice you need to construct the application in a manner that will ensure it shows the best aspects of the case to them.

There are lots of other lenders out there too (we deal with the pillar banks and many others as well), so looking at ‘best rate’ is perhaps different than ‘best attainable rate’.

Anyway, here is the list, if you ever want mortgage advice give us a call! 016790990

Best variable rate mortgage: AIB 3.24% (with one for 2.84% < 50% LTV)

Best 1yr fixed rate mortgage: AIB 4.15%

Best 2yr fixed rate mortgage: PTsb 3.1% < 50% LTV, otherwise AIB 4.65%

Best 3yr fixed rate mortgage: AIB 4.88%

Best 5yr fixed rate mortgage: PTsb 3.7% < 50% LTV, otherwise its AIB 5.35%

Best 10yr fixed rate mortgage: n/A 12/2011

Oh, one …

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Marian Finucane Show: 26th June 2010 – featuring Irish Mortgage Brokers

We were delighted at the invitation to join the Marian Finucane show on RTE 1 last Saturday for the second time this year, we were asked to go on alongside Angela Keegan of MyHome.ie to talk about property prices, mortgage lending criteria and property tax.

The RealPlayer version is here

You can check out an MP3 of it here

Or go to RTE and go through the list of shows to find it here

If you were listening to the show and have any questions relating to it please feel free to call us or email your query. We hope you enjoyed the show and if not then listen back to it!

We hope to be on this show again soon and help to raise the debate of Property Tax again.

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Sunday Times ‘Money’ Section mentions Irish Mortgage Brokers

We were very pleased to see that we were mentioned in the Sunday Times ‘Money’ section this week in an article by Niall Brady in which he examined the implications of reduced competition and increased regulation in the financial services market in Ireland.

For our part we were asked about mortgage credit and had this to say: ‘Karl Deeter of Irish Mortgage Brokers said: “Lenders are using every blunt instrument in the box to frustrate loan applications. One of my clients was turned down on the pretext her employment wasn’t secure. She works in reinsurance and, because of last year’s record floods, her employer recorded a loss. It is part of a global reinsurance giant, though, that makes €3 billion in profits a year. That’s the type of stupidity that borrowers are dealing with.”

First-time buyers must have at least a 10% deposit and a record of saving to back it up. “Banks aren’t interested in parental gifts or guarantees,” said Deeter. “They …

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If you didn’t like 100% mortgages you’ll loathe negative equity mortgages

I was interested in the front page of today’s Independent in which Charlie Weston broke a really big story about Irish banks being in advanced stages of designing ‘Negative Equity Mortgages’ (this is vastly different than the Negative Equity Loan/Short Sale Loan we have discussed previously). Essentially the bank will allow an individual to carry negative equity out of one property and move that onto another one within certain parameters.

This practice has already existed in the UK and is offered by Nationwide, Coventry and RBS, the schemes have not proved to be very popular, in part because of the stringent underwriting required. It is one thing for a client to fall into negative equity but another to actually facilitate them in compounding that fact and taking a further bet on their ability to repay. What do I mean by that?

First Loan: €200,000 Value: €150,000 Neg/Eq: €50,000

Then the €50,000 shortfall is passed into a second loan of (for example) €200,000 …

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Primetime 2nd February 2010: Mortgage Market Focus

Primetime took a look at the mortgage market situation in Ireland on the 2nd of February, they spoke to various industry experts as well as people on the street about their feelings on the situation. The clips below are well worth watching.

In this clip Primetime spoke to people on the street, and the general opinion was one of empathy for borrowers in trouble but the overall tone was that people didn’t necessarily want to step in and have their tax money going to bail them out. Then David Murphy interviews an anonymous borrower who is in debt trouble, as well as getting the opinion of Irish Mortgage Brokers Operations Manager Karl Deeter and Paul Joyce of the Free Legal Aid Centre (FLAC).

In the second video Pat Farrell of the IBF (Irish Bankers Federation), Stephen Kinsella (Lecturer of economics at University Limerick, and author of ‘Ireland in 2050), Pauline Blackwell of FLAC (free legal advice centre) and Ciaran Cuffe of the Green Party talk to Miriam O’Callaghan about the issues of debt and the solutions for solving …

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How a bank might undo your tracker mortgage

‘I have a tracker mortgage so I don’t care’ a man recently said to me when I was talking about the near definite increase in margins that we will start to see in mortgages as lenders seek margin and reprice risk.

It was almost said in a smug manner, a kind of ‘yeah, times are hard but I have my tracker mortgage’, and then it struck me, most banks have a get out clause, they don’t have to use it, but they might. So I thought it might be interesting to point out exactly how this could come about, and essentially the relationship it has with falling property values, so if your lender ever calls you out of the blue asking you to let a valuer into your gaff be sure to say ‘no’.

The way that trackers could be wholesale removed from borrowers is via an up to date valuation where the tracker rate is connected to the loan to value (LTV) of the property, many tracker mortgages only …

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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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