Ronan Lyons | Personal Website
Ronan Lyons | Personal Website

thepropertypin

Where in Ireland has seen the biggest increase in unemployment?

My recent post on negative equity led to some discussions, particularly on irisheconomy.ie, about the financial (i.e. NAMA) and labour market (i.e. dole) implications of negative equity. Here, I use Live Register figures to work out which counties have been affected most by unemployment since the start of the recession. A group of counties from Laois up to Cavan appear worst affected, although all counties have seen unemployment at least double. Read more

Irish house prices fall 4% since the start of 2009 – latest daft.ie report

Ireland’s property slump marked it second birthday today, with the news from the latest daft.ie report that asking prices for residential property fell 4.2% in the first three months of 2009. This latest drop in prices marks the eight consecutive quarter that prices have fallen.

As the official press release notes, the national average asking price now stands at just over €280,000, meaning that prices have fallen almost €70,000 from the peak in early 2007. What’s interesting to note at this stage is that Dublin was worse hit on average over the first quarter – in particular Dublin city centre, where prices fell by 11%. Other notable falls since the start of the year are Sligo and Waterford city, where prices fell by about 10% in three months.

The fall in the first three months of the year should not be underestimated, particularly as the year-on-year rate of change has now slid to -15.7%. Nonetheless, a graph of the quarterly change in asking prices gives some food for thought. The falls in house prices got worse and worse more or less every quarter from mid-2007 on – until now, as the diagram below shows. How much we can read into this, though, will have to wait until next quarter, when we can see if the trend continues.

Change in national average asking price from quarter before, source: daft.ie
Change in national average asking price from quarter before, source: daft.ie

Commentator for this report is Liam Delaney, a behavioural economics expert. He discusses the importance of psychology – and the value in terms of self-worth of things like owning a house or having a job – in current economic conditions. He draws an important distinction between public and private sector workers (or at least that’s how I interpret it):

This report – combined with the recent labour force figures – indicates considerable hardship for those in once solid middle-class jobs that are now facing a potential double-whammy. People will inevitably feel even worse when they see neighbours and friends who are in better situations. Consider the position of a college graduate who purchased in Dublin in 2006, based on the income from his financial services job (now gone), to the position of his neighbour who secured a public sector position on leaving college and purchased in 2001. While neither is laughing, the latter must at least be considering himself the better off of the two. They are certainly not in the same boat and the widening rift in society being generated by asset price decline and employment uncertainty is the defining theme of our time. As described by John Fitzgerald and others, there are many who are currently better off than last year, as they are facing declining prices and interest rates in the context of stable employment in their sector.

He also describes two scenarios for the future, drawing on Gerard O’Neill‘s own commentary on a previous Daft report, where he suggested that the current economic maelstrom in which Ireland finds itself is probably the only thing that could possibly ever turn Ireland into a nation of renters – the implication being that may just happen. Liam then walks through the implications of these two scenarios:

One version of a national narrative that was articulated in the previous commentary by Gerard O’Neill was the idea that the Irish cultural and psychological need for property may be displaced by a culture where renting is given more credence as part of a normal adult life. Were such a story about the Irish relation to property to take hold, it would clearly have substantial implications for any potential future rebound in property prices. Key players at the moment are those who can afford property but are riding out the current uncertainty by taking advantage of falling rents. If they follow Gerard’s story, they may never come back into the buying market and the next generation may follow them into long term renting.

Yet, we still hear strongly the story that the Irish have always been and will always be wedded to the idea of home ownership as a fundamental part of maturing into adulthood. If such a story about Irishness and adulthood maintains its hold, house prices will eventually settle at a higher level, and changes in the market will depend on macroeconomic conditions, rather than on the type of seismic shift in Irish culture described by Gerard.

I’ll be posting each day this week on different findings from the latest figures, starting tomorrow with a Budget-day special… did someone say an Irish property tax? Later in the week, I’ll also look at the stock of property for sale – which incidentally has now fallen, however slightly, each of the last six months – but before I do, a quick comment on asking prices versus closing prices. Accurate measurement of house prices is a hot topic at the moment – it seems the ptsb closing price index reached a minimum fall in year-on-year terms of 10%, while asking prices haven’t yet found their nadir.

Changes in asking and closing prices, 2007-2009
Changes in asking and closing prices, 2007-2009

The full report is available at www.daft.ie/report and contains, as mentioned above, a commentary by Liam Delaney, Lecturer in Economics with the Geary Institute, UCD, as well a regional and county-by-county analysis of the latest trends in the property market.

Hair of the dog: With rents fallings, ECB cuts the only thing likely to drag yields above borrowing cost

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 the expected yield and the cost of borrowing.

The result is here on Manyeyes. Blue means the cost of borrowing is greater than the expected yield, while brown means the opposite. Below, two quarters are shown – 2008 q3 and an estimate for 2009 q2.

The gap between the cost of borrowing and property yields in Ireland, 2008 q3 and an estimate for 2009 q2
The gap between the cost of borrowing and property yields in Ireland, 2008 q3 and an estimate for 2009 q2

What is clear is if that one takes a measure of this gap as a measure of market disequilibrium, the market remains overpriced. (There are of course plenty of reasons why rents as a proportion of house prices may not be the only measure of a housing market in balance, particularly where rental markets are small or negligible, but bearing that in mind, let’s proceed…)

To look ahead and see if this mass of blue is likely to change any time soon, I made some assumptions about interest rates, asking prices and rents, based on what we know now. I assumed that interest rates fall to 1.5% in June 2009, and that house prices and rents both fall 5% quarter-on-quarter in the first six months of next year, as high levels of stock in both segments take their toll. I’ve also assumed landlords will still get 11 months of the 12 in rent and that the rate at which first-time buyers borrow remains about 1.1% above the ECB rate.

I’m sure there are plenty of ways people might disagree with particular aspects of those assumptions, but I think they make, if nothing, else a starting point for discussion. (Take them as a straw man if you don’t like them!) Anyway, if those assumptions were to be borne true over the coming six months, the first thing to note is that yields would be largely unaffected – i.e. not going in the direction they should be, up towards the equilibrium long-term average cost of borrowing somewhere north of 4%. (It should be pointed out at this stage that yields in certain market segments, e.g. West Dublin 1-beds, are already very close to 5%, so averages certainly hide some interesting sub-county variations. For more check out page 10 of the last Daft.ie report.)

However, a collapse in interest rate – albeit gradually – in a steady-as-she-goes ECB version of the Fed’s record peak to trough interest rate journey would have the not unexpected consequence of turning all those blue spots brown. Well, most of them anyway. Once again, the prognosis is not good for Leitrim and Cavan, two of the counties with among the worst stock overhang in the country, on a per capita basis. Even with interest rates collapsing to record lows, that would not be enough to make the rate of return on property greater than the cost of borrowing.

Is the cure the world is adopting a central banker’s version of the hair of the dog that bit you? Or are we entering a phase of the world economy where caution is so predominant that low interest rates are the appropriate response?

Ireland’s property overhang: Homeowners in Roscommon, Cavan and Leitrim beware

Last week, I posted a visualization of changes in asking prices for Irish property, since 2006, using the IBM Manyeyes tool. It’s proved very popular, not least with the crowd on thepropertypin.com. I’ve been happy to take suggestions on what’s the most important thing to be mapping and one suggestion – which ties in nicely with some ideas I’d been working on – was to measure the number of properties for sale by county, per capita.

What I’ve done for today’s visualization is take the number of permanent households from the 2006 Census – and taken it as fixed. I then plugged in county-level figures for the stock of property for sale from the Daft.ie database, and used the two to calculate an approximate percentage of the total property stock in a county that’s currently for sale. There are a range of potential data issues, from taking the Census figures as fixed to how to capture the size of new developments – it’s my hope that while all those issues are valid ones, the overall story should be relatively clear.

As before, the results are available for all to see and download on Manyeyes. It’s probably pretty clear what the overall message is, though, from the preview below (click on the picture to go through to Manyeyes):

Percentage of properties for sale, by county, Jan-Oct 2008
Percentage of properties for sale, by county, Jan-Oct 2008

Some initial thoughts:

  • First off, Dublin seems among the least affected areas.
  • “Holiday home land”, i.e. counties like Wexford, Kerry, Cork, Donegal and Galway, have seen their overhang increase over the course of the year, but again, they are not the worst affected areas.
  • A trio of counties, Roscommon, Cavan and Leitrim, however, steal the show. Those three, as of start-October, had more than 10% of their properties for sale.

Data on how many properties have churned through the market since the start of 2007 would probably confirm that the hysteresis which has gripped the Irish property market is worst in some of the areas where the property boom probably reached its most irrational. As before, all comments, questions and thoughts welcome.