Irish Mortgage Lenders, who provides mortgages in Ireland

This post is a brief account of the residential mortgage providers in the Irish mortgage market, a brief look at who they are and what kind of lending they are involved in. Many people have no idea who is who, or who owns who so this should help to clarify some of that. Of course, as a broker we can help guide you through the myriad of lenders and options, but even our expertise is not an adequate replacement

The list of lenders in residential mortgages are (in no particular order)

1. IIB Homeloans 2. Haven 3. PTsb 4. First Active 5. EBS 6. Irish Nationwide 7. ACC Bank 8. Bank of Ireland 9. Springboard 10. Start Mortgages 11. Nua Homeloans 12. GE Money 13. Leeds Building Society 14. Bank of Scotland 15. ICS 16. NIB 17. Ulsterbank 18. AIB

Who they are and what kind of lending do they do?

1. IIB Homeloans: This is ‘Irish Intercontinental Bank’ and they were once owned by Irish Life, they then got bought out by

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The good thing about a Property Bubble

There is so much gloom and doom in the press recently that only those with the greatest fortitude seem to find any cause for happiness. Personally I have been talked down off the roof a few times already (philosophically not in reality). And hardly a day passes where the Government don’t give us some negative outlook news. If you are into sadomasochism there is a new way to get your kicks, it’s called the ISEQ and if you are truly sick you can always watch property prices.

However, today’s article is going to focus on the good life and the good things that are coming out of the property bubble and that will continue to serve us all better in the future (catastrophic losses aside)

1. The Bubble performed where the Government and Good Intentions failed: The Government and all of the good intentions in the world were never able to gentrify the north inner city (my former home), but the property bubble did a GREAT job! Walking down Sean McDermott Street or Gardiner Street after dark is no longer …

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Mortgages in Ireland, a little bit about mortgage brokers.

Just a quick note to readers, Irish Mortgage Brokers is an intermediary, we go between you and the bank to arrange finance. You can go direct yourself and get the same mortgage, however, over half of the market uses and intermediary to arrange their finance, this is normally because they don’t really how to get a mortgage in Ireland or because they find using a broker easier than dealing with the job directly. And some people just prefer the personal touch of a broker over that of call centres and branches.

If you want to find the best Irish mortgage rates you can do so in a simple phone call or online application, click on the ‘home’ button above and apply over the web or call us on 01 6790990 and an agent will be able to assist you. The people we tend to work with are clients looking for a First Time mortgage in Ireland, people who want to find out how to remortgage a property, commercial lending, and trading up/down.

We are regulated by the Financial Regulator as …

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What next lenders?

Here are some ideas about where we feel banks will go next in terms of the lending market, these are only opinions, whether or not we see any of this coming to fruition can only be told by time.

1. Early Redemption Bonus: Early redemption means ‘paying off your mortgage early’, in fact when you switch your loan this is what happens, or when you clear it entirely. Why would a bank offer you a cash bonus for actually moving your loan away from them though? Or for paying it off? Isn’t the idea that you pay lots of interest?

Actually that’s a mixed answer, normally it would be ‘yes’, banks want you to keep paying interest over time, but now we are seeing a few things that we have not seen before. Firstly are negative margin loans, if you have a tracker of anything less than ECB + 1.5% (ish) then the likelihood is that the bank is not making any money on your loan after their operational cost, therefore it may be worthwhile to give you a monetary …

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Save or get a mortgage?

The current market probably confounds many consumers, should you be saving in order to have a bigger deposit in the belief that the property market has bottomed out? Or do you buy now in the belief that the market has bottomed out and that any potential equity loss is worthwhile?

I met with an economist yesterday who shall remain nameless, but he made an excellent point, if you are buying a house to stay in yourself then really what you are doing is giving up future earnings in order to obtain an asset today, if that asset price goes down then it means that potentially you sacrificed a portion of your future earnings that you didn’t have to but most importantly it was all based on future earnings, and because that is somewhere down the line it was not really a ‘loss making’ proposition. This guy was and is a property bear but primarily on the investor side. It was an interesting point of view and one that I had not really considered in the past.

As a mortgage broker …

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Euribor, the distant cousin of the ECB base rate

We have written in the past about tracker mortgages becoming an endangered species. It seems that now we are witnessing the demise of them, the interbank rates and the ECB have become so disparate to each other that one is no longer an accurate gauge of the other. What does that mean?

The ECB is the rate set by the European Central Bank, and it is the ‘base rate’ (currently 4.25%), but banks can’t generally borrow at that price and instead they buy on the ‘interbank‘ market, this is the largest market in the world in which over 1.9 Trillion is traded every single day! It is how banks access the ‘Euribor‘ market (European interbank offered rate). This is basically run as an auction and because liquidity is an issue we have seen the prices of the Euribor rise and rise, demand is outstripping supply.

Why is the Euribor rising? Simply put, fractional banking means that banks must have a constant inflow of money …

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The next movement of the ECB

The ECB has always had inflation, or more accurately the ‘control of inflation’ as its only guiding light. The ECB raised rates by 0.25% on the 3rd of July and now it is time to wait and watch, to see what they will do next. While we don’t possess a crystal ball what we can do is take a brief look at the world and how some market movements may shape the next meeting of the ECB.

We are (worldwide) in an inflationary environment, in Vietnam inflation is at 25%! The highest it has been since the Vietnam War. The government there is trying to stop the importation of gold, because the Vietnamese have surpassed both China and India in the levels of gold consumption, in the first quarter of 2008 they imported over 38 tonnes. Why is this happening, and what does it have to do with the ECB?

The ‘Dong‘ is a fiat currency that was born in 1978, after the war, the currency that existed prior to that the French …

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First time buyers didn't, don't, and won't ever have it easy.

Recently the credit crunch has taken a whole new turn, and the way it is affecting the Irish mortgage market is of interest to anybody who has a mortgage. Today’s post will be about the changing position of first time buyers, the end of 100% mortgages.

First time buyers never had it easy, that’s my theory and here’s why: before stamp duty reform they had to pay for any property that was over €127,000 (an old £100,000 before the €uro came in) and that could not be borrowed, it had to be saved, during the time that prices were in that region the wages were much lower and stamp duty was a definite drawback to prospective home owners, on top of that they had to come up with a deposit of 10% which was also difficult because of the taxation system here. Then we all got a bit more prosperous, the Celtic tiger started to roar, cheap money became available and prices shot up. The old first time buyers were now owner occupiers basking in equity and that was fine, …

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First time buyers didn’t, don’t, and won’t ever have it easy.

Recently the credit crunch has taken a whole new turn, and the way it is affecting the Irish mortgage market is of interest to anybody who has a mortgage. Today’s post will be about the changing position of first time buyers, the end of 100% mortgages.

First time buyers never had it easy, that’s my theory and here’s why: before stamp duty reform they had to pay for any property that was over €127,000 (an old £100,000 before the €uro came in) and that could not be borrowed, it had to be saved, during the time that prices were in that region the wages were much lower and stamp duty was a definite drawback to prospective home owners, on top of that they had to come up with a deposit of 10% which was also difficult because of the taxation system here. Then we all got a bit more prosperous, the Celtic tiger started to roar, cheap money became available and prices shot up. The old first time buyers were now owner occupiers basking in equity and that was fine, …

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Average loan life set to rise as we witness the death of the 'Switcher' mortgage.

For almost the last decade we saw a market develop where customers were king, and where banks competed for their business, this was an era where ‘refinancing’, ‘switching’, and ‘re-mortgaging’ became a common occurrence, in the 1990’s the re-mortgage market was very small in comparison to where it went from 2000 onwards. The reason for the upsurge was that loyalty doesn’t pay when it comes to the Irish banks, they were giving new borrowers better rates and charging existing borrowers more, the choice of fixed rates for an existing borrower were always more expensive than for the person who had jumped ship elsewhere and come to a bank as a fresh client.

Today we are seeing something that has long been unfamiliar, banks are intentionally being uncompetitive, pushing rates to the point where they are not doing any marginal lending and where their average loan is reaching higher and higher above the ECB currently several banks have broken the 6% mark meaning that rates are now at the highest they have been in almost a decade.

This means that lenders …

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