RTE News: 1st March 2012, Allsop Space auction

At the auction last week we were asked if we thought that they were fundamentally a good or bad thing; the inclination (given the protests) may be that it’s selling houses out from under people.

Given that these are properties where the owners (virtually all of them were investment properties) cannot pay for them in the foreseeable future it can’t be forgotten that a speedy sale that reduces the build up of arrears and which sells a property where there are live buyers bidding against each other is probably the fairest way to do it.

Nobody likes the idea of anybody ‘losing’ their property (I can’t say ‘home’ because these were not family homes), but if they must then a fair and transparent solution is the best you can hope for.

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Moratoriums and Moral Hazard. How to help responsibly with a ‘Mortgage Rescue Scheme’.

According to FLAC there are 30,000 people in mortgage arrears at present, soon there will be too many people in serious mortgage arrears to avoid the issue any longer, while repossessions in Ireland are relatively rare compared to the UK (3 per 100,000 mortgages v.s. 200 per 100,000 in the UK) it is because many don’t make official statistics via the high court, and voluntary possession is unaccounted for (where the person doesn’t fight the lender and just agrees to a repossession), the ongoing forbearance of banks upon borrowers serves both parties, the banks don’t want to become home owners and equally the borrower doesn’t want to be out on the street.

However, with high unemployment, wage cuts across both private and public sectors and such indebted households (2009 has seen historic highs of 176%) something is going to have to give, and while there …

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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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Valuations in property are currently meaningless

Free markets, or indeed markets in general, have a tendency to set prices, not through control, not by one person holding up a placard and shouting from the rooftops, but rather through the process of prices reaching a point at where they occur, where demand and supply are reacting with each other.

So if you look for €3 million for a three bed semi in Donnycarney your property will not sell, no matter how much you want it to. At the same time, if you were to list a property there for €50,000 it would sell overnight, and both of these extremes demonstrate a pricing being totally out of balance with the market. The interesting point now though is this: The market itself doesn’t know what is happening, so valuations are currently meaningless. By that I mean the people who go out and value property are not able to make accurate assumptions about property prices in this market, we are seeing this daily, and then dealing with the end result which is …

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Mortgage Application Requirements: What do I need and Why?

The average mortgage taken out in Ireland is approximately €260,000. Before mortgage providers lend-out such large amounts of money they need to be as sure as possible that the funds will be repaid in full and on time over an agreed period. While a home loan is secured on the property as collateral, this should not reduce the lenders’ lending prudence because repossessing a home in the case of non-repayment of a loan is an absolute last resort which takes a lot of time, costs a whole lot of money and risks generating such grossly negative publicity that it is barely worth it and is entirely unattractive. So, to ensure this possible outcome is seldom reached; lenders vet their potential clients carefully using the following key documents on which to base their underwriting decision…

Photo ID Irish Law demands that a financial institution must establish the identity of a client before entering into any financial transaction. Of course, its logical that …

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