Home of the Year 2021 and RIAI Awards – by Nikola Lancova

The Home if the Year is a competition series where the team behind RTÉs is searching for the most unusual and architecturally stunning private houses. The desicion is based on functionality, clever design and individuality. Each week the team of three judges visits three homes across the country. They give the house score out of 10. The home that receives the highest score goes through to the finals.

This year it was the seventh season of this competition series. In this season judges visited 21 homes across Ireland. From these 21 competitors, the judges selected seven finalists:

David O’Brien (Cork) Jennifer Sheahan (Dublin) Tanya Lee Conroy and Noel Conroy (Galway) Saara and Mike McLoughlin (Co Limerick) Sally-Ann and Ruairí Mitchell (Dublin) Kevin Desmond (Dublin) Kate and Cian O’Driscoll (Dublin)

Of the above competitors, Jennifer Sheahan from Dublin won the prize. Her house is 1800s cottage in Dublin. She bought this house in 2019, it needed a lot of work, it was damp, there was no central heating and the toilet was outside. Jennifer renovated the entire house, knocked all internal …

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Are we at risk of Celtic Tiger property prices?

The Sunday Indepnedent ran a piece quoting Karl Deeter on the danger of high house prices, he said that ‘trees don’t grow to the sky’ which is a common expression in economic analysis that warns of the dangers of extrapolation upwards.

It’s common to hear ‘never again’ until something does happen again and that’s a real risk in housing because the headwinds are there to encourage an industry to go into hyper-supply which does resolve shortages but which usually also overshoots.

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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.

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RTE Primetime featurs Irish Mortgage Brokers

We were asked to take part in an interview on Primetime about house prices and whether or not they were starting to show signs of falling. Our view is that they will fall in time (probably in a damaging way) but that it won’t be soon because supply is still above demand and price indicators like rents are still rising. This is damaging for first time buyers and those stuck paying high rents.

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Newstalk Lunchtime, Wealth per capita now higher than back in the boom, 11th September 2018

Newstalk’s ‘Lunchtime’ with Ciara Kelly did a piece on new wealth statistics issued by the Central Bank which featured Karl Deeter from Irish Mortgage Brokers. It looked at the average wealth per person in Ireland and the point was made that property was a very large component of it. Other things that affect wealth were also discussed as well as some of the problems around using ‘averages’ to describe anything.

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Possibilities of House Prices to Fall

Disregarding the findings of all recent numbers and reports that have been recorded, Central Bank Governor Philip Lane is reported by the Oireachtas Finance Committee as saying that he is expecting house prices to fall over the upcoming 3 years.

This statement being a bold one as the figured recently released by the Central Statistics Office reports house prices to have rose in the previous month by nearly 13%.

Such a statement that if true, would be a drastic change in the housing market and would cause chaos among buyers and sellers as the stark difference between the two different scenarios.

Though Philip Lane cannot say for sure what the housing market will do in the coming years, he made his predictions based off of a few “headwinds” that are expected to be taking a hit to the market.

Specific events that many are expecting to cause a large backlash in the economy and the housing market are Brexit and the funding costs for banks.

If a negative outcome is to be the result of either of these, they should …

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Irish Times mentions Irish Mortgage Brokers: Why is there a housing shortage?

We were featured in today’s Irish Times on an article by Barry McCall asking ‘why do we have housing shortages’.

Our contribution is as follows: Karl Deeter of Irish Mortgage Brokers believes this is part of a global trend. “The mega-trend is that we are now living in a low-yield world,” he says. “Central banks are being forced to play both sides of the same table. Low interest rates cause asset prices to rise and the Central Bank is curtailing credit to prevent asset price rises. But there is an upward pressure on house prices despite this and it has been compounded by the earlier economic collapse which has led to supply disruption. These are trends that are bigger than any of us.”

While the Central Bank rules are undoubtedly playing a part in the problem, Deeter sees supply as equally, if not more, important and one factor here is planning laws. “Ireland has a particular problem when it comes to third-party property rights,” he argues. “Planning applications for housing developments are being turned down in areas where …

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The unaffordability index of Irish housing

This picture speaks a thousand words and in many cases tens of thousands of earnings that a person would have to have in order to afford an average home in different parts of the country. We used recent data from the Daft report and then broke it down into borrowings and compared that to average wages.

The column after ‘county’ is the average price in that region. If we assume a first time buyer will typically want a 90% mortgage we then look at the amount of earnings they’d need to have in order to get the loan.

The last column is where the real story lies, it compares prices in the area to average wages taken from the CSO.

Anything in a white cell with a minus is very affordable, anything in black means you’d have to be earning above average wage to buy a property in the area.

If the cell has a red background that is showing you where the difference is greater than €10,000.

It’s fairly clear that cities and in some cases …

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