Softening house market?

the pricier one looks a lot nicer tbh

The cheaper one was advertised a good few months back at €875k, went sale agreed quick enough and has now obviously fallen through and is being readvertised at slightly higher price.

The more expensive one had a ridiculous bidding war with about 7 people involved. Went to €1.1m and then disappeared from Hunters website but was never marked sale agreed. I suspect it’s been pulled from the market. Still on Offr.io with last bid of €1.1m showing from a month ago.

https://offr.io/property/24-rocky-valley-crescent-kilmacanoge-north-kilmacanoge-county-wicklow-ireland/4073

No lender would have topped up a tracker at the same rate as the rest of the loan. Anyone with a tracker who wanted to re-mortgage would have had to redeem the tracker loan and take a standard loan for the new amount.

Yeah that's interesting, definitely a strong trend.

Rumours of some pretty significant job cuts at Intel: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-11/intel-is-planning-thousands-of-job-cuts-in-face-of-pc-slowdown

Given the amount of people working in sales/marketing roles for tech companies in Ireland this will have a big effect if a few of the other big companies follow suit.

Demand includes the price. The number of buyers can remain the same but the price they are willing to pay can drop. Prices are set by the intersection of what people are willing to pay and what others are willing to sell for. That can indeed change without the number of potential buyers or sellers changing. The number of transactions can go down.

If the arse falls out of new morrtgage approvals, then you have the same amount of actual houses still and less people really being able to compete at old prices.

The macro issue is the risk if there are a lot of people in the same boat.

If it is your own house then you could lose your job etc. but that is somewhat within your control to rectify.

If you are an investor, perhaps with multiple properties, then there are many things beyond your control. You could have a vacant period if a tenant leaves, or a nightmare if they stop paying. Something could break in that property that you might do without in your own house for a while, but you would be obligated to fix now for a tenant. If you are dipping into your investment in order to go on a holiday, then that is a sign that you don't have much of a buffer there if things do go wrong.

You may be aware, for example, that buy-to-let mortgages are at a higher rate than owner-occupier ones. The reason for that is the additional risk. It isn't to give a present to the owner-occupier. It is because there is less risk involved.

Well it isn't a great sign, buffer-wise or attitude wise, if one is having to plan months in advance to top up that investment mortgage to go on a holiday. Having to fund fairly routine day-to-day expenses on credit (and then making snide comments to some other poster about that poster drinking cheap coffee in the dark or whatever it was before the post was deleted).

You're only really buying a site which will have a fairly certain chance of obtaining planning permission, albeit one where you might be restricted what you can do in order to make sure that you preserve the existing structure too

There would usually be conditions to incorporate an old vernacular structure into any house. That appears to be an old cottage. I don't see any pipes/sinks and there is possibly only an outside toilet. So I reckon you could be fairly certain you'd have to incorporate it.

It doesn't depend on whether the house is currently habitable. Just whether there is a house there. What constitutes a "house" may be open to debate. You hear stories of people where there is an old structure and they are able to go back on old maps etc. to prove that there was a house there in order to increase their chances of getting permission.

Local needs wouldn't be relevant for that site as the house is already there. That doesn't mean you'll get permission to change it to what you want though! I know a man who couldn't get permission for a new house but was able to get permission to build onto an old clay walled cottage that hadn't been lived in for about 70 years and had instead been used as a shed for that time. But he had to keep the old clay walls and renovate the old cottage and basically build a separate building out the back joined onto it if you know what I mean.

I think the "roof" thing is just an old "rule of thumb" that people used to say. "Services" shouldn't matter. Which ones would you include? ESB - well you can just connect. Water main - plenty of houses have wells. Sewerage pipe - plenty of houses have septic tanks.

Obviously the more intact it is the better. But that doesn't mean you won't get it if say the roof has been gone for a few years. Especially if it is an old traditional building and you are going to "preserve" it by doing it up

Those kinds of valuations are madness too. Because permission in a given location is fairly arbitrary in the sense that if you can get it in this field, you could probably also get it in the field next door. That is within the remit of the State and controlled by it, and yet it allows that kind of scenario to develop....Rather than say zoning a specific field as a cluster and then allowing someone to sit on it to hold others to ransom, why not "provisionally rezone" a stretch of 10 fields beside each other and say that there will be one cluster there and the first to sell/get permission/lock-it-in gets the available cluster.

The fact there is an existing house there may restrict what you can do or cause additional building expense compared to a greenfield site. Or it may just be that the asking may be low relative to the locality to drum up interest.