After a number of false starts, it looks like a Property Price Database will finally happen

AS THE DÁIL settles into a new session, the property market may be on the verge of a significant breakthrough at last. After a number of false dawns, and a lengthy lead-in period, it now looks likely that actual house and apartment sale prices will be published officially before the end of the year.

The property market, which is critical to the whole economy, has been starved of accurate information. Little wonder that it is skeletal and almost moribund.

It is true that until 2008 estate agents volunteered private-treaty sale prices to journalists for publication on the property pages in newspapers. But then exaggerations were uncovered and that was the end of that. So now nothing is published.

The Minister for Justice and Equality and Defence, Alan Shatter, now intends to expand the role of the Property Services Regulatory Authority to include publishing information on the sale of houses and apartments. It will not be trends, indicators or spin with graphs and figures, but actual prices and addresses.

So, it has finally been decided that the address of a sold property, the price at which it was sold, and the date when it was sold will all be published. The provisions will be included in the Property Services (Regulation) Bill, the long-awaited bill that is intended to regulate operation of the property market here.

The bill is at committee stage in the Dáil having completed all stages in the Seanad. Its progress through the final stages to enactment largely depends on the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Justice, Defence and Equality. The committee’s chairman, David Stanton, says that he is anxious that the committee stage be finished this Dáil session, which means before the end of the year. The bill will then go to the President for signing into law.

Publishing sale prices, addresses and dates of sale will give a significant boost to the property market. It will be a first in Ireland.

To see what we have been missing, go to mouseprice.com or directly to the UK’s Land Registry website, landregistry.gov.uk. We may finally catch up with Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway and other European countries.

The Society of Chartered Surveyors, which incorporates the Institute of Auctioneers and Valuers of Ireland, has been seeking a prices register while Frank Daly, the chairman of Nama, recently said it was “high time” a property price register was set up.

But there may be problems ahead. Privacy is an important constitutional right in Ireland.

In the case on phone-tapping taken by former Irish Times editor Geraldine Kennedy and Bruce Arnold against the State, the Supreme Court held that the right to privacy was one of the fundamental rights of the citizen. Neither the Government nor the Houses of the Oireachtas nor the President can set it at nought.

So is this proposal by Shatter unconstitutional? Nobody knows.

Strong opinions may be voiced that it would be, or that it would not be, but nobody knows yet. While the attorney general is better placed than most of us to know, the Supreme Court, and only the Supreme Court, can decide.

The Commissioner for Data Protection, Billy Hawkes, suggests that transparency can be achieved by reporting sales results in a particular area over a period of time. He argues that sale-price information can be fed to the market without identifying each house sold or the actual price achieved.

The problem with compromise is that it may please nobody and it may be business, or indeed no business, as usual.

The Central Statistics Office’s property price index, which was first published last May, may be very helpful to statisticians and civil servants, but it is not much use to sellers and buyers of houses and apartments who are starved of local, reliable sale information.

Based on information from eight lending institutions, the CSO index measures the change in the average level of prices.

The CSO tries to accommodate the differences between individual properties, even on the same street, but it measures trends, not actual prices obtained.

The strength of the Property Price Database will lie in its individual property information. Vendors and buyers will be able to obtain accurate information and compare prices and properties, noting, of course, that no two houses are the same. But at least comparisons at ground level will be possible.

It has not yet been decided whether the details will be published monthly or quarterly. The source of information for the new figures will be the Revenue Commissioners, which gets its information from individual solicitors for purchasers. Even transactions within families are included.

Nervousness, hearsay and suspicions have been driving, or indeed not driving, the property market here for the past four years. They take over when facts are not available. Maybe now, that is about to change.

Report by PAT IGOE – Irish Times

In early July, the pope gave a Vatican official special authority to act in the place of the bishop of Porec i Pula, Croatia, in signing a financial agreement compensating the Benedictines for the monastery in Dajla they felt forced to flee in the 1940s.

The property, which included vineyards and an olive grove, functioned as a parish until the then-communist government of Yugoslavia nationalized all church property in 1948 and turned the Dajla monastery into a home for the aged.

The Benedictine monks of Praglia, Italy, were given the property and established the monastery in the mid-1800s in the town on the Adriatic coast.

Croatian Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor met with Bishop Ivan Milovan of Porec i Pula Aug. 1 and, according to Croatian news reports, promised to write to the pope asking him to reconsider making the diocese compensate the Benedictines.

In a statement Aug. 2, the Vatican said the pope’s efforts to settle the dispute have lasted more than two and a half years and his decision to name a special commissioner for the diocese “aimed exclusively at reestablishing justice within the church, albeit with only partial compensation.”

The Vatican “regrets that this has been instrumentalized with an aim of presenting it in a political and demagogic light,” the statement said.

On July 6, the pope appointed as commissioner Archbishop Santos Abril y Castello, a former nuncio who serves at the Vatican as vice chamberlain, “who, on this specific issue, substitutes the local ecclesiastical authority, making it possible finally to reach a solution to the controversy,” the Vatican statement said.

The statement did not say how much money the diocese and the parish in Dajla were to pay the monks, although it did say that the value of the portion of property already sold by the diocese “is much greater.”

The Italian news agency ANSA reported that the Benedictines received compensation in the 1980s after Yugoslavia signed an agreement with Italy to pay Italians whose property was confiscated after World War II. Croatia gained its independence in 1991 and signed an agreement with the Vatican to return church property or provide compensation for it, giving the former monastery to the Diocese of Porec i Pula.

As the original owners of the monastery, the Italian Benedictine monks asked the diocese for the equivalent of $42.5 million for the property, ANSA said. Although the diocese sold off much of the land around the monastery to a developer planning a golf course, a commission of cardinals appointed by the pope to mediate the dispute set the figure at $8.5 million, ANSA reported.

Local government officials in Dajla have told Croatian newspapers that paying $8.5 million could bankrupt the diocese.

The Vatican statement said the concerns and arguments of the diocese “were taken into the proper consideration, according to criteria of fairness and justice, in the pope’s decision. Therefore, it is painful that the decision of the Holy See is being contested as if it had taken sides.”

Report by Cindy Wooden – Catholic News Service

More than 60 percent of China’s residents cannot afford an apartment and the high property prices in the cities are curbing the nation’s urbanization process, experts said.

“Migrant workers are unable to afford apartments in the cities, which forces them to return to their hometowns and build houses in rural areas,” said Li Enping, associate professor at the Institute for Urban and Environmental Studies under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, on Thursday.

Li was speaking at the launch of the Blue Book of Real Estate, an annual report on the development of China’s real estate market. It is the eighth year that the Social Sciences Academic Press under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has published the report.

“About 30 percent of the urban population own more than 50 percent of the total commercial houses in China,” he said, adding that of that 30 percent many have more than one home.

Such speculative investment is one reason that has caused urban house prices to rocket.

As part of its 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015), the central government pledged earlier this year to build 10 million units of government-subsidized housing in 2011 and 36 million units in total by 2015 in an attempt to cool the over-heated real estate market.

The country will need to spend about 1.3 trillion yuan ($197 billion) to build the 10 million units of government-subsidized housing this year. To fund the work, the central and local governments will together provide more than 500 billion yuan, with the remainder channeled from social institutions and individuals, according to figures from the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development.

However, the government is under great pressure to find the money needed to support such a large-scale construction program.

“The money should come from the government, banks and various social institutes,” said Wang Yulin, vice-director of the policy research center under the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development at the launch.

“The State-owned enterprises under the administration of the central government should take the lead and further increase their investment in building subsidized-housing projects,” Wang added.

Li Yang, vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said on Thursday that Chinese people should consider renting rather than buying.

“In China, only about 10 percent of people rent. That it is much lower than the 38 percent in the United States and the 70 percent in Germany,” he said.

Source: China Daily

Country appointing advisers for huge sell-off of land, property and tourism assets

Investors, agents and investment banks are preparing to cash in on a €35bn sell-off of Greek property assets. In a presentation last Friday, George Papaconstantinou, the Greek finance minister, outlined plans for Greece to undertake a huge sell-off of land, commercial buildings and tourism assets, as the country attempts to raise money to pay down its sovereign debt.

Greece, which has already been forced to accept a bailout from the European Union and International Monetary Fund, this weekend played down rumours that its sovereign debt holders might face losses on the bonds they have bought.

Papaconstantinou’s presentation outlined how Greece has begun a process of appointing property advisers and investment banks to assist it in a sale of property assets that it values at around €35bn.

The assets are likely to appeal to private equity buyers who have raised billions to spend on distressed sales, but have found fewer opportunities than expected from Europe’s overleveraged banks.

Greece will bring two portfolios to the market this year, in June and December, and two more in June and December next year. These portfolios will not consist of all €35bn of assets, which are set to be divested by 2015.

The first step is to set up a land registry of the property assets owned by the Greek state – something that has never existed before. This is under way, as is the process of appointing advisers to help create the portfolios for sale.

A National Sovereign Fund for public land with individual specialised portfolios of large properties will be established, and the sales will come out of this vehicle. Selling property assets on a large scale is more attractive to Greece than other countries, because of the high cost of raising new debt.

The UK, for instance, can issue new government bonds at a yield of around 3.5%, so selling property at 6% is an expensive way to raise capital. Greek government bonds are yielding well above 10%, and so selling property at a 10% yield is a sensible option.

Report by Mike Phillips – Property Week