We were really pleased about being chosen to discuss mortgages on Newstalk’s ‘Lunchtime’ show with Andrea Gilligan, it was part of a series called ‘project house’ which is helping people figure out how to buy a home. They needed mortgage advice and went to the experts!
Perfect Property has recently found success in finding the common budget of the average house hunter in Dublin.
While in such a crisis, this is information that has been found is essentially vital in understanding a piece to the puzzle of what keeps buyers from buying.
Of course, there are statistics on the shortage of homes compared to the increasing demand, a factor into understanding the crisis that is just as vital.
According to Perfect Property, a relatively new search engine, the average Dublin house hunter has a budget of €315,000 to purchase a home with.
A pretty substantial budget for any home buyer, however, we are still observing a vast amount of first-time buyers applying for the new state mortgage scheme, introduced just a few months prior.
A scheme that was expected to cover nearly 1,000 loans and last for an extended period of time is now lucky if it lasts the full year.
Of course, when looking in the Dublin area it can be expected that the budget for a home will …
We have designed a simple calculator that lets you put in your property price, what rents you are currently paying, how you think prices will change and how many years it would take you to save a 20% deposit if you only have 10% now.
Just download the excel file, fill in the bright yellow boxes on the first sheet, and then scroll down to the green area to find out if you win or got shafted. (download here)
You can play around with different scenarios, but suffice to say that a regular couple who have €25,000 saved up and are looking to buy a property for €250,000 today will be worse off if rents and property prices went up by 2% a year (and it took them 4 years to save the additional deposit required) to the tune of €15,500.
We don’t believe it is in the remit of the Central Bank to damage the balance sheets of financially healthy individuals, but you can test your own hypothesis and see how it …
Banks allowed their commercial teams to make a really big mess which the nation now has to clean up, the mess wasn’t on the residential loan book (although it may be in the future), it was primarily on the commercial/development book and those are the loans that NAMA will be taking.
So one might think… ‘at last, the bad stuff is out of the way’ and it is for the most part, at least from a ‘toxic asset’ point of view, what isn’t out of the way is the continued lack of foresight that major banks in this country seem to have.
I ask: ‘Did you know property prices have fallen significantly?’. ‘No I didn’t’ said the martian who just rode in on a moonbeam and landed in my office, but other than him, everybody knows the craic, house prices are down everywhere to varying degrees, and that means prices are lower than they used to be.
So why are some banks refusing to look at mortgages where the actual value of the property is …
