atoast2toast.com

The Irish Times own both Ireland.com and myhome.ie – They paid 50 million for the latter.

I read with interest

There are hopes that renewed activity may be taking place in the property market after website MyHome.ie said the number of second-hand properties that were “sale agreed” in January rose significantly.

The property site, which is owned by The Irish Times, said the figures had increased threefold compared to a year earlier.

MyHome.ie said it had observed a consistent month-on-month increase in the numbers of “sale agreed” secondhand residential properties since September of last year, going against traditional trends in the selling cycle.

The increase is being seen as evidence of a pick up in the residential market. However, it is not known how many of these sales were completed.

It is not hard to see how this could happen when you see their crude sale agreed chart which shows just over 200 houses sold in Dublin in Sep 2009.

The sale of a few hundred more is a reason to try to get the whole thing started again. It is not that difficult to triple a small number.

There are people selling their houses for half what they were notionally once worth.

According to Ronan Lyons this comes from having built 80000 houses a year:

Over the past few years, Ireland has built perhaps twice as many houses as it needed, due in large part to tax incentives. Between 2005 and 2007, a quarter of a million new homes were built in a country that only had 1.4 million households in 2005. Worse still, due to the nature of the tax incentives, many of these properties were built in areas that did not need them. It stands to reason that if you build twice as many houses as you need for three years, you’ll need to build half as many as you need for six years to get back to equilibrium.

So should we write off Ireland’s property market until 2015? Not necessarily. It’s likely that prospects will vary from region to region. As outlined above, areas like South County Dublin are certainly feeling the pinch now, falling almost €150,000 on average from peak values. In such areas, prices are determined less by wages and interest rates, and more by expected future value and confidence. Therefore, whenever sentiment eventually reverts to a more optimistic outlook, those areas are likely to rebound faster. With the government seemingly tied into a pro-cyclical trap and not able to implement an economic stimulus package, due to large increases in public expenditure in the good times, it is of course an entirely different question whether lower interest rates will be enough to kick-start sentiment in Ireland.

The fact that the official figures are not released means that the game is rigged.