Property

There has been a lot of silly chatter this week about “celebrity” economists. This term is meant to be demeaning. But everyone knows – post crash – that the main distinction between economists in Ireland is not the “serious versus the celebrity” but it is between those economists with “foresight” and those with “hindsight”. If…

I am writing this article from a ‘‘ghost hotel’’ in Leinster. Rumour has it that the business was recently sold for €1, but the hotel itself is probably in Nama. It will never be worth what it was built for. Today, as well as owning a small part of this hotel, I am the only…

THE most comprehensive report on the Irish property market is out and it evidences the total destruction of wealth of a certain generation. According to the wonderfully detailed work done by Ronan Lyons at Daft.ie, asking prices countrywide fell by just over 4pc in the second three months of the year — a slightly larger…

This Government will not contemplate selling property just in case it would bankrupt the banks. The State’s argument is that the market is depressed so if we were to sell the land, we would not get a fair price for it. So we will postpone the problem: we get NAMA — a financial skip into…

For the past few weeks, Irish banks have not been able to borrow abroad in any manifest way. The market is now as good as shut to us as money retracts from risky countries like Ireland to safer locations like Germany. This pattern is unlikely to change any time soon as the financial world comes…

They’re back! The creeps, the snake-oil salesmen and spoofers who condemned a generation to negative equity are cheerleading again. The advertisers are salivating too because the “property porn” industry sees a chance to sell its fantasy again. The papers are once more displaying “dream homes” replete with doctored photographs and Mediterranean blue skies — all…

The land has reverted to the price you’d get from a farmer for putting a donkey out to graze on it

Like all nursery rhymes, the origins of ‘Old Mother Hubbard’ are more complicated that they seem at first. When I was young, the rhyme was repeated to reinforce the value of savings. The moral of the story was that if you don’t put away something in the cupboard when times are good, you’ll have nothing to fall back on in bad times.

Last Friday’s 9.55am train from Limerick pulled out on time, hurtling towards the ‘Junction’. As we sped past the waterlogged land on a beautiful morning, commuters on the train were going about their business as normal, reading about the treacherous Thierry Henry in the paper and chatting to friends on the phone. As we arrived…

Did you know that our country’s housing wealth has shrunk at a rate of €142.8m per day since the peak of the boom in 2007? This is a catastrophic figure because housing wealth was one of the key drivers of spending, and domestic spending is what kept the dole queues so low in the boom years.