Irish Property Market chat II - *read mod note post #1 before posting*

Is it now safe to say that house prices are falling and housing stock is increasing?

I think holiday homes are starting to get sold now too. Myself and my siblings have a holiday home between us for the last 10 years or so.

My family were just in it at the weekend. All of the other holiday homes are now occupied full time, even though this place was always never planned to allow people to live full time in it. It doesnt feel like a holiday going there anymore where everyone in the place is on their holidays. It feels like walking into any residential estate now. Might as well buy a normal house as a holiday home in an estate in Lucan or Santry. Was talking to my brother yesterday and he feels the same. We are going to all meet up next week and decide whether or not to just sell it.

many people realizing they will have to settle for an apartment.

I goes like this

! want a nice big detatched house with a garden near Dublin city center ... Prices rise as time goes on

I want a 3 bed house anywhere within an hours drive if Dublin ..... Prices rise as you wait for your dream home price to come down

I want any house at all .... And prices continue to rise

Ill settle for a nice 2 bed apartment in a nice area, but prices are a bit high. I'll wait for them to come down .... They dont come down

I better take that 1 bed apartment that was €150k 2 years ago and is now €220k before i end up priced out of the market. ....

Jesus, I cant even afford a bedsit, better keep renting.

Could further interest rate hikes on the horizon be creating more urgency among would be homebuyers? Buy now or see your affordability drop further?

Price declines in Dublin for the last 5 months. Highest home completions since before the crash.

When we moved the house was going up in increments of 5k for about 3 rounds. In the end there were 2 other bidders besides ourselves.

We took a time out for about 2 weeks to think about a new strategy. And we decided we could be messing around for weeks driving the price up. The other bidders are probably like us. Why dont we just take the view that if we dont get this house it will probably cost us 50k more next year the way prices are increasing. Sure if we had bought it the year before we would feel good now having got it for 50k less and here we are bidding at 50k more than it would have been last year and thinking we are spending more than its worth.

So we pretended it was next year and house price had increased by 50K. We called the EA. The other couples were still going and it was 10k more than we last heard.Said to the estate agent - last go, Current bid plus 50k and you get back to us in an hour wil a yes or no. They phoned back half an hour later and said yes.

One of those other bidders was a cousin of our new neighbors. They told us one day that their cousin was bidding on it and thought the EA was messing when a bid of 50k over came in so they dropped out. Im sure the other bidder thought the same.

Similar house around the corner went on the PPR for 100k more than we paid not too long ago. Even if the price had gone down, we still locked the mortgage in at 2.2%.

So even though everyone, including us, thought we were mad paying way over the current bids, we are happy we did the right thing now. Wouldnt like to be trying to buy the same house today, about 2 years down the road.

50k seems a cheap price to pay for the peace of mind and security it brought us.

Its not even the rate. That was just a fluke tbh. The main thing that helped us was realizing that prices go up more for longer than they go down and that next year we would probably be delighted to bid on a property at a higher point than we were this year.

The problem with trying to squeeze in before the interest rates go up is the amount of time it takes to close a sale on a property. 12 weeks is average so the coming triple whammy hike in May, June, July won't be avoided even if you go sale agreed in the next week.

So overbidding can result in major affordability issues if you're banking on the interest rates being what they currently are.

The other thing is, rates go up and down. They won't always be high, they won't always be low. With higher rates comes a potential reduction in house price as affordability hits.

You are totally wrong though.

Boards, as a small example, is full of real people ovet the years, even in this thread, who are waiting for prices to come down or waiting for the big recession before they buy. We all think our own opinions are right right ones.

Nearly everyone buying this year could have bought last year or the year before, except that they thought they werent getting value for money. Anyone looking back a few years from any point (most of the time) would think they got a total bargain if they could buy a house for that price now. Yet a few years ago it was a ripoff. Humans are like that.

I wouldn't agree with your assessment that most people could have bought earlier but chose not to.

Obviously we run in different circles but anyone I know is buying as soon as they can - and thats people in a decent state job - early thirties.

We're not timing the market and we don't have access to another 50k.

So the queues at viewings and bidding wars for the last 6 to 7 years were imaginary and people were comfortable paying double in rent than they would be paying a mortgage.

There may be some element of truth during the early stages of Covid, but that quickly evaporated as it was quickly realised that the money printing done over covid was a potential disaster that had to be averted by raising rates and reversing QE

Ther were always queues. Even when people werent buying houses. But I dont belive at all that you can say that many people didnt hold off buying the last few years bcause they thought the property wasnt worth the price it was bid up to. Read the currently buying thread. Full of examples. So is this thread. There have been many tangents in this thread of people who are buying but poisted proerty details and said "Its not worth that, i am going to wait til things calm down."

Irish people love seeing their home values rise. They wont say that in public but they do. As such government does very little that might impact that. They left housing crisis get worse than needed to because they were too concerned too much supply would affect prices. Interest rate rises have cooled things in Cork in my limited experience this year. More houses also being relisted. But not seeing any big correction down either.

Some of this is definitely true and we will always look back at people who bought at ‘the peak’ and call them fools (but we should all admit the peak is very hard to call).

But there is a fundamental difference to people buying now and those in 2007.

Nobody buying a house today is buying a house they can’t afford because of lending rules. A lot of people buying in celtic tiger thought it was the negative equity that got them, but in reality many had loans they could never ever have serviced even if prices had kept going up. So in that sense people buying now are not ‘going mad’ in the same way as those described by Kenny.