Prices crashing? Not in Galway it appears...

Morbid.Angel

This post has been deleted.

digitally-yours

I think the important questions are

Are all this prices sustainable ?
Is the house i am buying really worth it ?
You can buy a house its not a problem <contact any subprime lender in ireland>
The question is will you be able to pay the mortgage.

IF and now i mean "IF" the economy goes nose down and recession kicks in
and there are no jobs and unemployment goes high.

Then the people with houses will be in trouble

or if the intrest rates go up as a result of Inflation again i think house owners will feel the pinch.

I think feburary or march will be a good time to enter market.
Given that the prices and trend stays downwards and we dont see any intrest rates. No bank collapses, no bad news in financial markets etc etc

There are loads of factors involved.i know some people might not agree with me but thats my opinion.feel free to correct me if you think i dont make sense

mikemac

Maybe because Dublin and surrounding areas were the first to rise and will be first to fall.
And the rest of the country will follow eventually.

I hear this argument with Limerick a lot, don't know if it's true or not

Of course, rural areas will probably be the first to fall.

Just throwing this theory out there OP

galwaybabe

According to an estate agent friend of mine, the market in Dublin has been stale for a few months now, very little moving and that the Galway market is following this pattern.
My cousin bought a house in Knocknacarra a couple of months ago for 345,000 and was gutted to see a house a few doors up sell for 325,000 a month later.
If anywhere is oversupplied with houses it's Galway city and the surroundings. The quality of the latest developments is disgraceful; the houses are tiny, the building work shoddy and there is no apparent effort to put in adequate infrastructure.
If you go out for a drive around the Headford area you will see a shocking amount of Southfork style empty houses. a lot have these have an identical twin next door of equal ugliness. Who in their right mind would choose to move out of the city to live on top of someone else?
I can genuinely see these houses having to be torn down in ten years time because of how badly built they are. We are already seeing places like the apartment blocks at Fort Lorenzo and the townhouses behind Tescos being examined for structural damage. Fort Lorenzo is currently being underpinned while the townhouses behind Tescos had huge cracks in them which seem to have been addressed by a quick bit of plastering and tarting up.
There are many many more examples like these in Galway. I really pity the poor lemons who buy these places, they really have got themselves a pig in a poke.

chump

Morbid.Angel wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

What do you mean by this?
Reports that reflect prices are dropping are doomsday reports?
Celebrity economists are those economists not hired by vested interests - ie. the banks?

gurramok

I did drive through Loughrea a couple of months ago, its quite shocking to see the amount of property for sale there.
Nearly every third house up for sale(part i drove through), absolute surreal for a town of its size, there are 401 gaffs for sale on daft there at the mo, strip out a few sites, easily over 300 apts&houses for a pop of maybe 5,000 for sale?

the following are also evident as of 13/10/07 from Daft

Galway city - 500 houses & 211 apts (pop 72,000), a house/apt for sale for every 10 people

(maybe deduct<10% of figure as sites for the following)
Craughwell - 102
Ballinasloe - 306
Athenry(my fav place) - 250
Oranmore - 152
and lastly..Tuam at a whopping 358

To the OP, the above is gross oversupply, prices can only go south with too few buyers.

Do-more

gurramok wrote: »

Galway city - 500 houses & 211 apts (pop 72,000), a house/apt for sale for every 10 people

72,000/711 That would be a house for every 101 people

You need to go to Roscommon or Longford to find places with a house for sale for every 10 people (a house for sale for every two people in some cases!)

EnoughSaid

Do-more wrote: »

72,000/711 That would be a house for every 101 people

You need to go to Roscommon or Longford to find places with a house for sale for every 10 people (a house for sale for every two people in some cases!)

Roscommon? according to this:

http://www.daft.ie/discussions.daft?dcn[forum_id]=4&offset=50&limit=10&dcn[discussion_id]=101968&dcn[root_discussion_id]=0&dcn[forum_id]=4

everything is going well in Roscommon!

Raskolnikov

I think that there are two markets within Co. Galway, the city itself and everything else in the county. Demand for rental property within the city is massive. You need only look at the hundreds of people who queue for the property supplement of the Galway Advertiser to see this. The problem is though, that Galway has no high-rise and the city just sprawls out for miles. Galwaybabe is dead right about the state of the suburbs. Take a look out at Doughiska or the Headford Road. Thousands of pokey little duplexes and terraces with no decent services, footpaths or even roads. I would almost go as far as saying that Galway is the worst town in Ireland for new housing developments.

Galway badly needs decent quality high/medium rise buildings in the heart of the city centre.

ionapaul

My parents live in one of the nicer estates in Knocknacarra and any houses on sale there have been on the market longer than 6 months and one in particular has dropped its asking price by almost 10% last month. Heard that there have been no offers at any stage and very few viewings...though who can say what the truth is when neighbours are talking! A family member owns out near Doughiska and there are dozens (hundreds?) of empty houses out there, houses that may have bought up to two years ago! Crazy.

galwaybabe

Just a quick to follow up on my earlier post. I drove from Galway City to Clonbur (45 miles) yesterday and counted 23 empty houses just on the main road. That is an empty house every two miles! Over half of those were up for sale in an uncompleted state. Furthermore there was at least three for sale signs pointing down side-roads for every one empty house on the main road. That means there was roughly another 70 houses for sale in the general area.
I have looked up the census figures for 2006 and the total for that area is 5519 people link
This means that there is an empty house for every 60 people. Sustainable? sensible? Oversupply?

dame

galwaybabe wrote: »

Just a quick to follow up on my earlier post. I drove from Galway City to Clonbur (45 miles) yesterday and counted 23 empty houses just on the main road. That is an empty house every two miles! Over half of those were up for sale in an uncompleted state. Furthermore there was at least three for sale signs pointing down side-roads for every one empty house on the main road. That means there was roughly another 70 houses for sale in the general area.
I have looked up the census figures for 2006 and the total for that area is 5519 people link
This means that there is an empty house for every 60 people. Sustainable? sensible? Oversupply?

Just because a house is empty doesn't mean it was built for sale. A lot of people get a site from parents and build on it for themselves to live in. It could be that those "empty" houses are simply not ready for their owners to move into.

At least three signs for sale signs pointing down side roads? I doubt that. I think you're guessing at that figure because you didn't count. How many of those houses you counted were actually in towns or villages?

galwaybabe

dame wrote: »

Just because a house is empty doesn't mean it was built for sale. A lot of people get a site from parents and build on it for themselves to live in. It could be that those "empty" houses are simply not ready for their owners to move into.

At least three signs for sale signs pointing down side roads? I doubt that. I think you're guessing at that figure because you didn't count. How many of those houses you counted were actually in towns or villages?

A "for sale" sign outside would indicate to me that a property is for sale!
The estimate of three houses down each road was the average of what I counted.
FYI I counted the houses on the main road on the way out of town and the 'for sale' signs on the side-roads on the way back
Having a problem accepting something dame?

dame

Nope, I've no house for sale in Galway or anywhere else, just finding it hard to believe that those were all for sale and all outside of towns and villages on the main roads. There is supposedly a planning policy of not allowing too many new exits onto main roads. There's also a clause which means people have to hang onto their one-off house for ten years before selling it.

galwaybabe

dame wrote: »

Nope, I've no house for sale in Galway or anywhere else, just finding it hard to believe that those were all for sale and all outside of towns and villages on the main roads. There is supposedly a planning policy of not allowing too many new exits onto main roads. There's also a clause which means people have to hang onto their one-off house for ten years before selling it.

Many of these houses were probably started before that clause came into being. Also please bear in mind that when it comes to knowing the right person in the right place, Galway tops the league in planning loopholes and corrupt planning officials. It is common practice here to build first and apply for retention later. It is very rare if ever that a house would have to be taken down.

gurramok

Do-more wrote: »

72,000/711 That would be a house for every 101 people

You need to go to Roscommon or Longford to find places with a house for sale for every 10 people (a house for sale for every two people in some cases!)

Yeh yeh...typo on my part, damn extra 0 went AWOL

Anyway, anyone out that way in Galway county just needs to have a drive around certain towns/villages to see all those for sale signs on offer to such a small population.

dame

Galwaybabe, I was up that direction a few days ago and I didn't see the same number of empty houses and houses for sale. Also, some of the signs you see are for land for sale, not houses and in a couple of cases there were signs were for a house and for one or two parcels of land which were originally all the one farm. It often happens that a house can be empty because elderly residents are in hospital or a nursing home, possibly for years. In some cases you were probably counting multiple advertisements for small housing developments (eg two developments in Headford alone), where the signs can be located on all sides of a town/village so you're seeing them even though they're not on your route and even though they are in towns rather than being one-off houses.