Property Market in Waterford

75% drop on Irelands most expensive house:
http://www.independent.ie/national-news/irelandrsquos-most-expensive-house-drops-in-price-by-a-staggering-euro43m-from-high-of-2005-2884260.html

Sold for €58mil in 2005 and now they want €15mil! Looking unlikely they will get it!

This tells you something about how things have gone....

reni10 wrote: »

75% drop on Irelands most expensive house:
http://www.independent.ie/national-news/irelandrsquos-most-expensive-house-drops-in-price-by-a-staggering-euro43m-from-high-of-2005-2884260.html

Sold for €58mil in 2005 and now they want €15mil! Looking unlikely they will get it!

This tells you something about how things have gone....

Trophy properties have nothing got to do with the general property market!
It's like car magazines that always have something like a Ferrari/ Lambo/ Porsche on the cover, but 99.999% of the readers will never own one!

There is no 'general' property market.
A general property market is one where the ordinary working person/ family is able to avil of credit and therefore purchase property. Without credit, there is no market.
Whilst there is a market for cash buyers due to distressed sales etc, that does not constitute a normal market as such.
There is some way to go yet in the depression of values, due to contraction in the overall economy and reduction in GDP.
It is my own personal opinion that the best the this country can look forward to is that in 5 years time we will be back at 2011 levels. The Troika led austerity cuts have only started, and the powers that be want to extract as much wealth from this country as possible before our eventual default and inevitable single currency (Euro) exit. Profits will be privatised and debts socialised. (Read ESB, water, sell-off as the profits and State guarantee for the likes of Anglo, Nationwide etc.....as the debts)
The level of sovereign debt will be at an unsustainable level in 3-4 years time, and the repercussions for all economic activities in the state will be immense. This may sound like an overly negative outlook, but unfortunately it is a realistic one.
Again, just because you don't want something to happen does not mean it won't happen.
Would I buy property now? No.
If I had capital, would I invest it anywhere in this 'state'? No.
Ireland Inc. is a failed state, and is viewed as such by the financial markets, and is actually a third world country (in economic terms), we just have not woken up to that fact yet.

Sorry if this reads purely as an criticism as the economy as a whole, but that has to be understood and appreciated if one is to view the 'property market' One is dependent on the success of the other. Unfortunately in Ireland we have viewed for too long the 'success' of the property market as an indication of the health of the economy, but of course in a normal functioning economy, a successful economy allows a healthy property market.

reni10 wrote: »

I pretty much agree with most of what you have said, there is another 10-20% to come out of prices in the next 6-12 months and then I see a levelling off for a few years.

And to keep this on track here is another ridiculous pricing of property in Collins Avenue:
€265k!!!:
http://www.daft.ie/searchsale.daft?id=618199

That is a max €150-€160k house in this current market and will be €130-€140k in 6 months time!

Some people obviously live in another world....

Cheers gman2k, my sentiment exactly. Also, I don't think your thread is being pesimistic, more like realistic.

Some more official figures out confirming property price drops across the country:
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2011/0926/breaking20.html

We definitely have not reached the bottom yet!

Another 10-20% to go in Waterford over the next 6-12 months!

This is a very strange one! 3 Bed, 3 Story Detached for €115k:
http://www.daft.ie/searchsale.daft?id=619451

I don't know anything about this area at all but for €115k for a detached property(although it looks really ugly!) then that is a pretty good price if the area is alright?

Nolanger wrote: »

Why not? Rent it out to a few nearby hospital staff and you'll have the money back in by the end of the decade.

Sorry, I meant to say I'd never buy it to live in myself. And it's not really very close to the hospital and, as it's not very attractive, could prove difficult to rent if you were to go down that route.

Nolanger wrote: »

The architect who designed that got at least 400 points in the Leaving Cert!

He must not have gone to WIT so as we all know that nobody with more than 350 points goes there.

Daft.ie report saying the average 3 bed semi in Waterford is now €132k, I think that is a bit high as these figures seem to be based on the advertised asking price NOT the actual selling price; how many properties in Waterford actually have been selling for anywhere close to their asking price!:
http://www.daft.ie/report/?utm_source=daft.ie&utm_medium=strap_line&utm_campaign=strap_5_daft_house_price_report_q2_2011

Waterford now is about the 6th lowest for 3 bed semis in Ireland.

As I have been saying for the last few months I feel €110k-€120k is the baseline price for a 3 bed semi on the Dunmore road with it being about another 10-20% less in other areas.

Expect it to level out at about €100k in the next 6-12 months.

Again my advice to anyone that needs to sell is set the price realistically and sell if you get anywhere within 25-35% of your realistic asking price otherwise you are sitting on a depreciating asset and also paying for that privilege in terms of your mortgage payments.
If you don't need to sell then wait at least 5-10 years before even contemplating selling.

Finnbar01 wrote: »

Just heard on WLR that house prices in Waterford have dropped by 5% between June to September.

Average house price is €148,000, approx half of what they were during the boom property bubble.

A 49% price drop from peak.

FYP

Here's a good article that explains why house prices will continue to fall nationally.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2011/1001/1224305066691.html

Ireland experienced the largest property bubble and the most violent property crash. That crash, alas, is not over yet, and prices are unlikely to stabilise until next year at the earliest. If the 2011 rate of decline in residential property prices continues for another 12 months, prices will fall by about 15 per cent from their current level. Given the headwinds facing the market, that is more likely than not.

But the highly paid consultants who arrived in Ireland to stress-test the banks after last December’s EU-IMF bailout are working on an even gloomier set of assumptions. Their baseline view is that prices will fall by a further 20 per cent before the market hits bottom. In their worst-case scenario, the decline would be almost 30 per cent. That would bring the fall from the 2007 peak to 59 per cent.

Although there are benefits to lower prices in the longer term, the weak property market feeds through to the wider economy in many ways. One of these is the wealth effect. When prices are rising, people feel better off as the value of their home – usually their biggest asset – grows in value. On average, they save less and spend more.

When prices are on the way down, all this goes into reverse to create a negative wealth effect. Now people are salting away far higher proportions of their already shrunken incomes. The result is to reduce further the level of activity in the domestic economy.

So how far will prices fall and for how much longer will the economy be afflicted by the resulting negative wealth effect?

It is not necessarily the size of a bubble that determines how low prices will go when they fall. More important in the Tiger bubble was the extent to which it was inflated by unsustainable drivers, such as risk-blind bankers hosing money at anyone taking a punt on property.

I think this last point is a good one. A lot of people think that just because prices are down 50% and will likely hit 65% within a year that that must be the bottom. There is a mentality that because prices have fallen so much that they cannot fall anymore. The reality, as pointed out in the article is that prices will continue to fall as long as the relevant factors push them in that way.

And the reasons why:

If there is an undersupply of houses in Britain, the building mania here between 1997 and 2007 has led to a huge oversupply. While the extent of that oversupply is contested, nobody doubts the existence of a large stock of unsold homes. According to the property website daft.ie, the number of unsold properties on its books up to the second quarter of this year had remained stubbornly high, with hardly any reduction over the past three years. This glut will weigh on the market for some time to come, putting continued downward pressure on prices.

IF BUILDING TOO MANY houses can end in tears, so can bad lending by banks. Although the US did not look out of the ordinary in the property-price rises it experienced from 1997 to 2006 (130 per cent compared with Ireland’s 400 per cent), it has suffered the second-worst rich-world crash (after Ireland), and the residential property-price drops from coast to coast are now greater than those during the Great Depression in the 1930s.

But if banks lent too much during the boom, they are not lending enough now. The latest figures, released yesterday, show that bank lending for property purchases continued its long decline in August. The lack of new mortgage financing is yet another factor weighing on the market, as is the rising cost of financing mortgages for those who have been able to secure them.

At a time when almost all of the drivers of demand are weak, the psychology of buyers in a market where prices are falling has a further negative effect. When prices rose, seemingly inexorably, it was all about getting a foot on the property ladder, at almost any cost. But now that prices are falling, also seemingly inexorably, most rational people want nothing to do with the property ladder.

This is part and parcel of any deflationary dynamic: potential buyers postpone their purchases in anticipation of even lower prices, sucking even more demand out of the market and adding momentum to the downward spiral.

All of these are in the context of national house prices. Waterford in particular has been hit worse than average in terms of job losses and emigration, and it seems like it's going to continue that way. More bad news today with job losses at Rigney Dolphin. Thus, Waterford will see price reductions even higher than the national average.

Out of interest, has anyone on here actually bought recently or considering buying at some time in the future in Waterford?