MediaWatch – 29/03/07

The Sunday Business Post asks: do vested interests keep house prices up?

Writing in the Sunday Independent, Ken MacDonald (of Hooke & MacDonald) has a bullish piece on why the Irish Property Market is no house of cards.

RTE reports that a survey of consumer attitudes conducted by the ESRI and IIB Bank, has found that house buying intentions among Irish consumers are now at their lowest level for more than a decade.

RTE also reports that official figures show a sharp drop in the number of planning permissions granted for new homes in Q4 2006.

The Irish Times claims that fears over the collapse of the housing market are spreading.

The Irish Independent (in a single issue) reports that homeowners are likely to face more interest rate hikes, runs the story of a buyer who having bought 3 years ago claims to be relieved they didn’t buy last year, editorialises that a period of “unnatural exuberence” may be leaving the property market, Brendan keenan has quite a bearish piece on his outlook for the property market, and the Independent finishes with a piece on the new House Price Index from Delta Index – which essentially allows spead-betting on the future of the Irish Property Market.

MyHome Report #3 – 25/03/07 – 799 Price Drops Detected

A 2-week analysis of MyHome.ie has detected 799 Price Drops. The report is here. Considering the 2 week time period, the per-day average detection of drops is less than in some previous MyHome reports. However, the drops total over €24 million, so the euro amounts are perhaps more significant than previous drops.

The largest price drop recorded is a 36% drop (450k) in the price of a 5 bed bunglaow in Skerries Co.Dublin. Honourable mentions include a 33% drop (400k) in Kilcock Co. Meath and an almost 27% drop in Westport.

It is expected that there is some overlap with the most recent Daft.ie report. Even a cursory glance reveals the presence of the 24% (150k) drop in Athboy, which was originally detected on Daft.

As usual – comments, corrections and verifications are always welcome.

MediaWatch – 22/03/07

Note: I’m a fan of the US property blog http://www.thehousingbubbleblog.com – and I find the blog’s habit of collating links to relevant news stories to be very helpful in assessing the media’s take on current events.

From time to time I may collate news stories relevant to both the Irish market and overseas markets where the Irish appear to have carried out a significant amount of investing/speculation [delete as appropriate] in recent years.

This will be a “here’s what you may have missed in the past few days” collation, whereas for up-to-the-minute articles, keep your eyes glued on http://www.thepropertypin.com

The Sunday Independent reports that the hitherto insatiable demand for overseas property seems to be diminishing. It will be interesting to see if this feeds into the projected/actualised capital appreciation in these markets, and whether it will have any knock-on effects on confidence at home.

The Sindo also continues it’s crusade against stamp duty, the article uses the slightly more emotionally-charged phrase ‘home tax’ to describe stamp duty.

Unfortunately I don’t have a link for it, but the Sunday Times lead with the a piece entitled “The ten-year house price boom is over”. The article went on to claim that house prices in Dublin have fallen by 3% by October, and Galway’s by 10%. The front cover of their property supplement showed a gravestone, which was just a tad over-dramatic IMO. An image of this cover is here.

The Irish Independent reports on fears of slowdown in the Spanish property market.

The Kilkenny People reports that house prices in the county have increased, apparently bucking the national trend.

Writing in the Irish Times’ Property supplement, Marc Coleman argues that the reckless lending seen in the US market, will not affect the fundamentals in the Irish market. He also makes the interesting claim that some apartments in ‘outlying’ areas of Dublin are being sold for 20% less than the asking price.

Daft Report #1 – 20/03/07 – 422 Price Drops Detected

The first IPW analysis of Daft.ie has revealed ~422 price drops over a 7-day period last week. The report is here.

The Daft report required a manual cleanup due to the presence of a large number of duplicate entries on Daft.ie. I’ve removed the obvious duplicates after a quick visual inspection, but it’s likely that at least one or two are still in there.

I’d wager that the 36.67% drop recorded in Louth is dubious. Even though it can be proven with a google cache (I’ll add the link in a subsequent comment), I feel that it’s another case of an Estate Agent entering incorrect prices.

Other than this, the standout price drops appear to be (a) the 24% (150k) price drop of a 3-bed bungalow in Athboy Co. Meath and (b) a pretty significant haircut of 24.24% on the price of a site in Wexford.

It should also be noted that several properties (not presented in this report) have changed their asking prices to “Price On Application” over this 7-day period – rather than publicly advertise their new (possibly/presumably lower?) price.

Finally, it will be interesting to see how much overlap there is between drops recorded on Daft, and on MyHome – many seem to suspect that Daft is dominant outside of Dublin.

First Daft.ie Report – Expected shortly

Due to an unfortunate broadband-blackout at IrishPropertyWatch HQ (translation: my apartment) this weekend – it will be at least Wednesday (21/03/07) before the first IPW Daft.ie report is published. The numbers are being crunched as I type, and the most prominent drop so far is a 24% (150k) drop on a 3-bed bungalow in Athboy Co. Meath.

It is also obvious that the Daft report will require more manual ‘cleaning up’ than the MyHome reports. Daft.ie appear to allow many duplicate entries for the same property, so again I will be relying on readers’ input to help identify duplicates and any other erroneous data.

The last thing I want to do is to contribute any misleading or false data.

MyHome Report #2 – 11/03/07 – 418 New Price Drops Detected

An analysis performed on myhome.ie this week (6 day period) has confirmed that many asking prices on www.myhome.ie continue to be revised downwards.

418 price drops have been detected and are detailed in the latest IrishPropertyWatch report, which is available here. Please note that these drops do NOT include the ~284 drops detected last week, all 418 have occoured in the past six days.

The total euro value of the reduced asking prices is roughly €10.5 million. Although if I were a property bull, I wouldn’t hesitate to retort that €10.5 million would only get you two or three nice 3-bed semi-D’s in a respectable part of Dublin

Finally, the most obvious price drop in this report is the 42.43% drop detected (495k to 280k) in Co.Galway. This drop is so ludicrous that I almost automatically deleted it from the results, assuming that it was a programming glitch. However, to my astonishment I could actually verify this drop using google cache, I’ll append the link to the cached 495k asking price in a subsequent comment.

However, I myself do not believe that this is an accurate price drop. If I had to bet, I’d say that the Estate Agent has simply mis-typed the lower asking price. Perhaps they meant 480k or 380k instead. I know that if my Estate Agent’s first suggestion on how to shift a property was to slash it’s price by 42%, we’d be having words

All comments, independent verfications & corrections welcome.

Should this site also aim to record price increases?

A number of contributors have suggested that for the sake of balance, it would be worth attempting to also report on any price increases that can be detected.

First of all, I feel that a recent post by Coles sums up my take on this question:

“The guide price of a property for sale is usually not increased once it has been put on the market. There is no benefit to the vendor of rising the asking price after it has been published, and if more than one party is interested in the property the price will rise anyway. I wouldn’t expect a price rise to be found for any individual property.”

From my own personal experience of buying and selling property, I have never seen the listed price of a property increase – even when I knew that a ferocious bidding war had erupted and propelled the current bid on a house to 10-30% above the asking price. Leaving the price at the original value always seemed to have the effect of luring-in more potential bidders.

The one exception to this is new build properties, where newly released phases have (in the majority of instances) increased in asking price. However, price fluctuations in new builds are currently the most difficult to automatically ascertain, hence the numerous errors in the first IrishPropertyWatch MyHome report.

What have other people’s experiences been of listed properties where the vendor’s asking price has increased?

Finally, there is a delay in adding analysis of daft.ie to this site. The reason being I had to unexpectedly do some travelling this week, I’ll have the site back on schedule shortly.

MyHome Report 05/03/07 (284 Price Drops Detected)

An analysis performed on myhome.ie this week (two snapshots taken aprox. 4 days apart) has detected a rather sizable 284 price drops. The (v simple) report is here, it’s ordered by percentage dropped. There are some rather large drops detected (two above 30%) so it would be nice if they could be verified by a third party via use of caches etc.

As this was the 1st full run of the analysis tool, it’s likely errors and/or duplicates have worked their way in to this initial report. Please add a comment if there’s something that needs attention.

So what’s it all about then?

Put simply, this website will attempt to record any drops in the asking prices of Irish Residential Property.

I have been impressed with the diligent (although surely laborous) work of the good folks at both the Property Pin and the Irish House Prices Falling Blog. However, this website aims to help automate the process.

The initial plan is to publish (aprox. weekly) some simple reports detailing price drops (if any are detected) on the two most popular national property websites, www.myhome.ie & www.daft.ie.

I expect this website to be outmoded in the coming months by something a little slicker and more detailed, such as the recent plotting at the Property Pin, but until that time perhaps this site can help get the ball rolling re:automation of price drop detection.