D16’s ‘challenging’ year as new pads impact prices
THE market for second-hand houses in Dublin 16 is being impacted by the availability of new houses, with second-hand properties showing minimal growth during 2018 and even falling back slightly in the third quarter. Knocklyon was impacted most.
“Overall 2018 was a challenging year,” notes agent Carole Ross. “First-time buyers are drawn to new houses, with the Help to Buy scheme and high energy ratings. For a second-hand house to compete with that, it’s all about price. If a second-hand house is in gorgeous condition and priced right then it will fly.”
Given D16 is on higher ground it’s not surprising that weather also played a cooling role. “We had five days of snow, and there were mounds of it on the ground for weeks afterwards,” says Ms Ross. “We couldn’t take photographs, and there was a knock-on delay in properties coming to the market.”
Ms Ross says that there were very few buyers around in September, traditionally the start of the busy autumn season, as by then, the banks had run out of exceptions.
Ms Ross says that 2018 reminded her in some ways of 2007, and that the differing expectations of buyers and sellers were sometimes hard to reconcile. “Vendors were so used to seeing reports of house price inflation that they’d be saying to us, ‘What do you mean the value of my house hasn’t gone up by €10,000 in a week?’
“But many media reports are based on asking prices or those of mortgage draw-down figures when a sale closes, whereas agents see the price four months before that when a property goes sale agreed. Vendors read about prices going up when that’s not always the case. And when the media reports that prices are dropping, we have buyers wanting to sit on the fence and wait for them to drop further.”