The door has opened on the Irish house price recovery.
The Irish Independent is reporting the latest CSO data that house prices in Dublin rose on average 22% in the year to the end of May, but only 1.8% in the rest of the county.
Hubert Fitzpatrick, the director of housing, planning and development at the Construction Industry Federation pointed out the rise was due to supply constraints:
We need to quadruple housing output in the Dublin area. We will build 1,800 units this year. That should be 8,000. There is a genuine shortage of new housing supply… What’s moving are smaller infill sites with own-door units. The banks are reluctant to fund larger sites. At present market prices are not sufficient to cover input costs on many sites. New house prices are still 50 per cent lower than they were seven years ago. Input costs have not fallen by as much.
Which banks will lend the most to Irish home buyers
As part of their commentary on the CSO’s data, the Independent’s Louise McBride has explored which banks are lending and how much.
Although we perhaps disagree with the sentiment (buyers should look to get a mortgage within their means, and not as much as they can get), she shows the Permanent TSB are the most generous for single people while KBC is the place to go if you are a couple.
Peter Hanson sinks hole-in-one, pays woman’s mortgage for a year
Sadly she wasn’t an Irishwoman, but when Peter Hanson sunk a hole-in-one at the Quicken Loans National, the eponymous sponsor paid off a customers’s mortgage payments for the year. Can we get Bank of Ireland to sponsor our local Pitch’n’Putt?
