Irish Mortgage Brokers in the press, May 2010

We had a busy month in the financial commentary world. A list of our press mentions is below

23rd May 2010: Sunday Tribune: Safe for a while against rate hikes

23rd May 2010: Sunday Times: A bad time to invest? Q & A with Jill Kerby

23rd May 2010: Sunday Tribune: Mortgage rate increases

16th May 2010: Sunday Times: Keep hold of your home

16th May 2010: Sunday Tribune: Mortgage group mull over Negative Equity Loans

16th May 2010: Sunday Tribune: Recession Rates

14th May 2010: Newstalk 106: Ivan Yates talks to Karl Deeter about Property Prices

15th May 2010: Independent: Property prices must fall to attract investors

13th …

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Irish Property Investor Report: Spring 2010

We are pleased to release our new Irish Property Investor Report for the Spring of 2010 (click on the picture to view it). The people that put it together this time were Frank Quinn (IPAV), Lecturer in Valuations at Senior College Dun Laoghaire and Irish Mortgage Brokers.

The property figures were provided by PropertyWeek.ie (who also run a non-practitioner site at MyHat.ie) and a critique of the report and methodology (which we deemed  necessary in the spirit of balance) was carried out by Iain Nash.

The news is not positive, we have determined, using our valuation methods; that property as an investment is still unattractive in the spring of 2010, in order for it to make sense prices would need to fall significantly in our major cities in the range of about 39% on average.

Having said that, this report looks at averages and it can’t …

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Behavioral Economics & Arrears – avoid repossession by reward

I had an interesting conversation with Frank Pallotta of Loan Value Group in New Jersey earlier today. Loan Value Group is an organisation that was set up to help avoid foreclosures, they use the expertise of behavioural economists from Wharton, mortgage finance experts, mortgage advisers, and consumer marketing experts, to work with lenders at risk of strategic default and likely default.

There are really only two classifications of borrowers in difficulty, those who can’t pay and those who won’t pay – Loan Value Group can both identify and work with either cohort.

We share a common view on principle reduction, Loan Value Group’s opinion is that ‘blind principle reduction’ is very negative, it addresses the consumers balance sheet, but from a working point of view for every other stakeholder its a mess. And if people are willing to lie for a 0.5 to 1% – reduction in rate then imagine the incentive if there was 10k or more in principle reduction? Therefore, we need solutions that don’t disadvantage the …

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Can a bank take back my tracker mortgage?

There has been some talk of this lately, and it is an issue that we have raised concerns on in the past – to get the good news out early – there is only a very small chance that banks might ever actually do this, but just in case we already pointed this out in 2009 and early 2010.

We’ll assume though that it is going to happen (for the sake of this post), so how will they do it?

The recent points have been regarding the small print in some of the tracker contracts, one example below is taken from a KBC tracker contract, but suffice to say similar or other ‘same end result’ conditions exist in other contracts (click on the image to see a larger version).

In this example KBC have had every right to remove trackers from their clients since …

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Mortgage Question: I have no savings, can I borrow a deposit?

The majority of lenders now insist that your deposit comes from a non borrowed source, and will decline your application if you plan to borrow it. The lenders who will consider your application will assess your application with the new deposit loan as a financial commitment which decreases the amount you can borrow on the mortgage, and because it is a short term loan it will eat into borrowing capacity much more than you may expect.

[eg: €100,000 loan over 30yrs costs c. €420 before tax relief, but one tenth of that, €10,000 at personal loan rates over 3yrs will cost c.€313 per month which would reduce the amount you can borrow by approximately €80,000!]

Short answer: You should aim to have your own equity in the deal via savings, if you borrow a deposit then you are running an additional risk and our firm are of the belief that this is generally not in the best interest of the borrower.

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Who has the best mortgage rates?

The ‘best rate’ is a misnomer because interpretation of what is the ‘best’ is a subjective question, for a very conservative person a 10 year fixed rate is ‘the best’ and from that point the ‘best’ will likely be whatever is the cheapest ten year fixed rate, having said that, after careful consideration the best 10 year fixed rate mortgage might be one that allows you to pay off a lump sum during the fixed period without any penalty thereby ensuring that you can eat into your capital quicker, is a feature like that worth extra money each month if it isn’t the cheapest? To some people it may be, to others it isn’t.

If you are considering a property purchase and are not a cash buyer then you will need financing, and this comes at a ‘price’, the interpretation of that price is generally the rate, so which rate is better (we’ll assume you want a 1 year fixed rate), 2.5% or 2.6%? Naturally you’d be inclined to say it is …

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Fred Harrison talks about the property tax

I called Fred Harrison in connection with a book review I had done for the national broker associations magazine ‘The Professional Insurance Broker’, I wanted to send him on a copy, what was meant to be a quick hello/goodbye turned into a fascinating chat on the topic of property taxes.

Something that we are seeing more of lately is a debate where the public sector are demonized – often for merely existing – and portrayed as being ‘wasteful’ and bloated. Bob Frank in the US said something to me before that stuck in my head, that ‘the serious waste occurs in the private sector, the public sector don’t go around buying hummers and other pointless trophies, the ‘waste’ in the public sector however, is found in the way that they budget and perform versus the private sector’.

I think that is profound, the public sector don’t waste in the same manner and it is important to remember that in any …

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Irrational banking, non-competition creating profits unexpectedly.

That banking in Ireland is a little irrational at present is a given, however, there are occurrences in the market which will change pricing structures in the near future, interestingly, by trying not to compete for business, several banks will ultimately make the market more profitable for all of the banks, achieving almost the opposite of what they had hoped to do.

I’ll explain, at the moment we have seen widespread Sovereign Credit Retrenchment, that’s a fancy way of saying that banks who are bailed out by certain countries are only really focusing on their indigenous markets because it is those markets that bailed them out. Irish banks have done this, Irish owned UK operations are closed. Equally, UK banks here are doing this by making their existing business rates higher and their new business rates exceptionally high.

Bank of Scotland’s new business variable rate is 6.19%, a whopping 5.19% over the ECB, they are doing this to avoid lending, and they are also paring back LTVs so that you have to have greater equity in the deal to borrow, …

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