Increasing rates across the continent

According to a recent poll, Ireland’s average mortgage rate is 2.64%. This is only 0.01% higher than it was the previous month, when it was 2.63%.

Irish rates have decreased as the economies of the rest of Europe have gotten more expensive. With the release of these new figures, Ireland actually dropped out of the top five most costly Eurozone nations for the first time in five years.

Ireland’s rate of 3.10 per cent, is higher than the average rate of 2.21 per cent in the Eurozone. Still, Ireland’s rate is lower than it was a year ago: 5.95 per cent this time last year.

The average interest rate on Irish fixed-rate mortgages is 2.49 percent and 3.77 percent on an Irish variable-rate mortgage.

Ireland now has the Eurozone’s eighth-highest mortgage rates, trailing only Germany and the Netherlands. Households in these countries, on the other hand, tend to take out much longer-term fixed rates than Irish households (up to 20 years or more), which typically have higher rates.

The average interest rate across the continent is increasing. Latvia has the …

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Regular wages and purchasing homes

In the current market, there is an increasing want and need for housing in Ireland, especially in populated cities such as Dublin. With this increasing demand, prices of homes and rent are rising each year. One problem that many soon-to-be or want-to-be home owners face now is the inability to effectively save for a home when they are paying high rent fees month after month.

The Central Statistics Office of Ireland notes that the average full time worker made around €45,611, while an average part time worker made around €16,600. Using surveys on these two numbers, we can say that the average worker in Dublin makes around €37,000 per year.

These numbers seem to allow a single person to be able to obtain a mortgage and afford a home, but if you were to add into the equation any additional expenses, such as children, rent or transportation, there would be a significant amount of money deducted from those average numbers.

The national average rent in Ireland is €1,122 per month. If you are interesting in living in Dublin, …

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2008: When banks independently all decided to make a similar decision

This week five years ago is when independent mortgage advisors were in the middle of getting some harsh news, some lenders were pulling out of the market completely, others were informing us of 50% cuts to procurement fees.

Fair or unfair? In light of things like Croke Park it would be seen as totally unfair, you’d never get any other industry that takes a 50% hit like this as fast (and then there is the separate issue of lending dropping 95% on top of the 50% reduction).

Brokerage has already been down the path the public sector are on. I recall sitting across the table from PTsb chief David Guinane who in late 2007 called in the broker bodies and informed them that they were getting a reduction that they might not be happy about, but that this was not something we could negotiate.

There was talk in brokerage of boycotting both them and Irish Life in return, and while we were still debating about what to do all of the other …

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Banks acting like teenagers?

I smiled when I heard that Central Bank director Fiona Muldoon had described dealing with the banks as ‘like dealing with troublesome teenagers‘. This was referring to their resistance to resolving their loan book issues for the last five years.

The thing that wasn’t mentioned was ‘why’, and as always, it’s the ‘why’ that plagues many of us the most. The ‘delay and pray’ response is a standard tactic deployed by lenders when they have a crisis, this has occurred in Japan in the past, is currently an issue in Vietnam and also in the USA. Banking is one of the industries where honesty is not the point, survival is. At any time a bank could unwind if everybody made their claims against them and the same broadly holds true for dealing with bad debts.

If a bank started to deal with one bad debt (at a time when there is a pent up mass of them in the …

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RTE 9 O’Clock News with Martina Fitzgerald, 22nd April 2010

Martina Fitzgerald of RTE 9 O’Clock news did a piece on the Government backed lender Home Choice Loan, critiquing the fact that they have only advanced 5 mortgages since their inception in autumn of 2008. Home Choice Loan was set up to alleviate the absence of lending in the Irish mortgage market but it has failed to do this which is evident in the numbers.

We believe that Home Choice Loan does have a very relevant and meaningful role in the mortgage market, but not in the guise of being another lender competing with the rest of the high street, rather in facilitating people in negative equity or arrears.

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Will Specialist or Sub-Prime lenders be better off?

With the news coming out daily about prime lenders facing higher and higher impairment charges it begs the question of who will do better during a downturn, specialist/sub prime lenders or prime high street banks?

Banks stated that they feel impairments of up to 90 basis points were likely, some have revised this figure higher several times with NIB predicting impairment of upwards of 300 basis points. Sub-prime lenders on the other hand start off with predictions of high impairment and they price and gauge the risk accordingly from the outset. Given that starting point, could it be a case that Irish specialist lenders may come out the other side of the liquidity crisis with an overall book that fares proportionately on margins than other prime lenders?

To answer this question we must first consider margins, with many banks typical margin is from 1% to 1.5% on average, however, with many prime lenders this margin is  lower because of low margin trackers that were a point of heavy competition between …

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Talk the talk and walk the walk (economically speaking)

I wrote an article back at the end of 2005 called ‘the changing face of the mortgage market’ and I sent it off to a few newspapers and several magazines, it went largely un-noticed, when I say ‘largely’ I actually mean ‘totally’. Apparently I was ranting lunacy or something close to it, if you know me you’ll also know that this was a possibility….

Last weekend in a smokey Krakow it was mentioned during a conversation that you need to make a call on things and then fall on your face when you are wrong but remain vindicated when you are right. In the spirit of that conversation (with thanks to our own resident Enda Munnelly) I will list the predictions I had and then we can either collectively laugh at me or not. The main thing is that I put my predictions on the line and show whether or not I can walk the walk.

1. More than 100%!

Traditionally there were two things stopping people from getting a mortgage, the first was qualifying for the loan, the second …

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