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.
In this discussion the way that council houses are used was discussed, the piece is very topical because there are serious overcrowding issues in many council houses where you have five or more people crammed into a one bed home while other people in council owned houses occupy four bed houses on their own. Our view is that this is a national emergency and for that reason the people in these situations should swop with one another.
(click into the blog post for the video) We were really happy about taking part in panel on the Late Late show on RTE to discuss the rented sector and some of the issues being experienced in it at the moment.
We were happy to take part in a more light hearted segment of radio on Today FM when Matt Cooper had Karl Deeter in to discuss different news items from the week that was. He was joined by the journalist Larissa Nolan to discuss many different topics from ‘beer goggles’ to property prices and slavery.
Karl Deeter and Brendan Harbor of the Forsa Union discussed whether or not the state should agree to have the members of Forsa work fewer hours per week and maintain the same pay. Karl strongly disagreed making the case that if things like the health service are not working well now that you can’t expect them to maintain current levels or improve if everybody is working fewer hours, such an assumption is simply illogica.
The full clip of the segment is below.
We spoke to Ciara Kelly about the current property market and where we believe we are in the cycle. She was surprised to hear us say that we believed a crash was virtually an inevitability. There are myriad reason for property cycles and the routes to resolving them are politically unacceptable, for that reason we are confident we won’t avoid experiencing another one.
This is our article that appeared in the Sunday Independent when Karl Deeter was covering a column for Charlie Weston on the 5th of November.
We need to speak to banks in the language they understand, not the language they ‘tell us’ they understand, but the actual language they speak. That language is the language of money.
The ongoing tracker scandal doesn’t cover many of the mortgage holders who lost trackers – many banks took them away from landlords as a part of granting them longer interest-only periods and with some of the biggest institutions these borrowers aren’t covered.
While some may have a hard time feeling pity for landlords, I would remind them that you can’t delight in their financial pain then scratch your head when they jack up rents and squeeze tenants for all they can in order to pay the new higher cost of lending.
Banks are as big a cost to this country as many aspects of public health, we spent more bailing out banks than we did on curing cancer in the last eight years.
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Our compliance manager Karl Deeter was on Claire Byrne Live on RTE 1 last night to explain the ‘Paradise Papers’. This was a cache of documents that helped to expose tax avoidance on a large international scale. He explained the difference between avoidance and evasion as well as asking whether or not these papers were ‘good’ because if a person didn’t break the law should they lose the right to privacy?
These papers are likely to expose actual evasion and on that basis they need to be examined, we are confident that the news coming out of the Paradise Papers is far from over.
Ciara Kelly interviewed Karl Deeter from Irish Mortgage Brokers in a very comprehensive manner regarding mortgage rates in Ireland and why they are so high. The interview covered a lot of ground, from default risks, to competition, and also why brokers are so important in the mortgage market.
It ended with a suggestion that perhaps banks can’t be entrusted to deal with mortgages in the absence of independent advice and that on that basis they should not be allowed to advertise them and that we should offer new lenders coming into the market some benefit in order to increase competition here.
Cormac Ó hEadhra had Karl Deeter from Irish Mortgage Brokers on his show along with Joan Burton (Labour TD), Michael O’Regan (Irish Times), Carol Nolan (Sinn Fein TD), Colm Burke (Fine Gael Senator).
The discussion focused largely on the tracker mortgage scandal and also covered the stand-off in Stormont.