House prices

Limerick tops global property price affordability index for the second year in a row

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The latest release of Demographia’s annual survey of house price affordability has created headlines for highlighting how chronically unaffordable property is in Hong Kong. Median property prices in the territory were a staggering 19 times median household incomes in the third quarter of 2015, a new record in the twelve years that the survey has been published. Hong Kong has beaten its own record set in 2014 of properties being valued at 17 times median incomes, which in itself beat …

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What Goes Boom – the Northern Ireland housing bubble in an international context

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Yesterday’s reports that prospective purchasers were queueing to purchase properties at the new Belvoir Park development in South Belfast will have brought back memories for some of the housing boom of 2006-7, when it was a common sight to see people waiting overnight for an opportunity to purchase newly built apartments and houses. There have been other signs of a return to life in the local property market, such as a Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) survey that indicated …

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Investment bubbles: houses, cars and tulips

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This is not really a typical slugger topic but I thought it would be interesting to look at parallels with the housing bubble in Northern Ireland (and even more so the RoI). Keep that in mind if you find what I am writing too tedious. I have a major interest in classic cars. I have a pretty encyclopaedic knowledge of 1960s onwards sporty cars and have got assorted classic car magazines for years. My real passion has always been Porsches. …

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Britain is, and remains for all the rhetoric of Conservative and Labour, a two nation society…

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So Labour is drifting, according to the polls.  The Observer yesterday put some bones on to why that may be happening. Or rather it explained why to some extent there is no real substance to Labour’s UK opposition… Today’s Opinium/Observer poll shows Labour dropping three percentage points from two weeks ago to 36%, taking its lead over the Tories to only seven points. Some senior figures in the party suggest that Labour’s silence for much of the summer is symptomatic of …

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Northern Ireland house price fall steeper than the Republic’s?

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Fascinating piece of analysis from Nama Wine Lake on Northern Ireland’s collapsing residential property market : …in Northern Ireland, there’s an underappreciated phenomenon unfolding with prices there having declined by 54% in real terms. This morning the quarterly University of Ulster/Bank of Ireland house price series has been released and it shows that the average settled selling price of a home in Northern Ireland in Q1, 2012 was GBP 134,560 (€168,347) which represents a decline of 1.9% from the previous …

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