In this post, I take a look at the maths behind buying or renting. Amazingly, even in heady market of 2006, it was cheaper to buy than rent. With rates back down at very low rates, and generous mortgage interest relief, it is once again cheaper to buy than rent – and looks set to stay that way, unless there are significant changes to the tax system.
Annual savings for owning rather than renting, 2006-2009
A review of the latest trends in Ireland’s residential lettings market, from the Q1 2009 Daft.ie Rental Report, including a map of the changes in rents by county.
Ireland’s property market is currently in rewind. Homes now are at March 2005 values – or July 2004, if asking prices are 10% above closing prices. Figures from daft.ie, the Census and the Dept of the Environment allow an estimate of both the number of homes now worth less than when they were bought – about 725,000, or 40% of homes – and how many of those are in negative equity -about 340,000, or 20% of homes.
The US leads the way for many types of statistics – and in particular for their timeliness. The housing market is no different, with a plethora of measures such as prices and volume of transactions out every month.
In Ireland, though, we have to labour under a dearth of timely statistics on a range of economic [...]
This week’s daft.ie report revealed some intriguing findings in relation to the current state and trajectory of Ireland’s property market. As was discussed yesterday, for example, while east peaked earlier than west, north has fallen further than south since the peak. One of the conclusions of both these findings is that Dublin and its commuter [...]
On Monday the latest daft.ie report came out, showing that asking prices had fallen just over 4% in the first three months of the year. Yesterday, I changed focus on the blog a little, as it was Budget day, and tried instead to put some numbers on what a potential property tax could raise.
Today, I [...]
With Davy Stockbrokers predicting a 70% fall in Irish construction activity from its peak over the coming ‘medium term’ (2009-2011 or so), I though it might be timely to review some headline statistics for Ireland’s property overhang.
Recently, I’ve been peddling the idea that between 2004 and 2007, we were building twice as many homes as [...]
The third and final (for 2008 anyway) instalment in the visualizations of Ireland’s property market takes a different look again to my recent posts on trends in prices and stock. Building on the measure of affordability on page 10 of each daft.ie rental report and a suggestion made on thepropertypin.com, it measures the gap between [...]
As those who’ve checked out/had to put up with my many word clouds on various different topics from Wicklow genealogy to Barack Obama will testify, I’m always looking for new ways to present data and information. For those with similar interests, a useful tool in that regard is Manyeyes, a free data visualization service offered [...]
