Europe’s two richest countries, France and Germany, have cast their weight behind their poorest peer, Greece, saying they do not intend to push the near-bankrupt nation out of the euro fold. Neither, they say, do they have a new proposal or plan to keep Greece’s running debt crisis from spiral out of control.

But on Wednesday French President Nikolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel took a huge leap of faith by telling their embattled Greek counterpart George Papandreou that they expect him deliver on pledges to reboot the Greek economy.

It’s not the first reprimand Mr. Papandreou has faced in recent months, but it will probably be the last.

The threat, including an imminent cut-off of multi-billion loan funds from international lenders, has set fire to dragging Greek feet. Finance ministry officials are now scrambling to push through delayed reforms and make up for more than €2-billion in shortfalls recorded in the 2011 budget alone. “We have to rally together once more in a national effort,” Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos said earlier this week.

That may prove tricky.

With recession biting deeper into the Greek economy and unemployment soaring — it’s expected to climb to 20 per cent by 2012 — austerity-hit Greeks are balking at added belt-tightening measures like never before.

On Friday, civil groups said they were mounting class-action suits to block a new property tax announced by the government this week in a desperate bid to close the €2-billion budget shortfall. A string of social networking sites and blogs have sprung up in recent days, rallying Greeks not to pay the new tax.

Seven in 10 Greeks already face difficulty paying a rash of tax hikes imposed by the socialist government in the last two years, according to opinion polls published earlier this month.

The new tariff aims to target high-earners. Still, it exempts monasteries, places of worship and charity funds run by the wealthy Greek Church while leaving none of the country’s five million homeowners untouched — not even the handicapped and unemployed, who are traditionally shielded by the state with special exceptions.

Enraging Greeks further are government threats to plunge homeowners into darkness if they fail to pay the tax, which will be charged through landlords’ electricity bills.

“It’s blackmail,” huffed Nikos Fotopoulos, the leader of the country’s most powerful union. “We will not allow the public power corporation to become a means of tax collection for any government.”

The measure signals what analysts are calling a complete collapse and humiliating failure of the country’s ailing tax collection system. It also mirrors the government’s repeated refusal to pursue radical spending cuts in the bloated public sector, a move that would upend decades of cozy ties between the ruling party and its core constituency.

“They are killing the private sector,” says former finance minister Stefanos Manos, who now leads a political action group. “The government should quit and Greece’s international lenders should spurn such disgraceful moves [ the tax levy].”

Perhaps. But until then, Mr. Papandreou — and Greeks altogether — have been given one last chance to stay in the euro.

Report by anthee carassava ATHENS – The Globe and Mail

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

That bottom in South Florida’s real estate crash can be tricky to spot.

Tuesday’s Case-Shiller numbers brought good news on home values, while obscure new data from a federal housing index shows accelerating drops in values across the region. The Federal Housing Finance Agency charts housing values using a method similar to the famed the Case-Shiller index, comparing recent sales to past sale prices on the same property.

The advantage to Case-Shiller’s South Florida index is it’s released each month, with new numbers out Tuesday morning showing a second month of increasing values in a region that includes Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties.

The advantage to the quarterly FHFA index is it gives data for Broward and Miami-Dade separately.

With Tuesday’s June Case-Shiller numbers, the indices seem to be parting ways. Case-Shiller showed the first back-to-back increase for South Florida since last summer. But the FHFA index shows continued decline.

That’s probably better news for South Florida’s real estate market, since Case-Shiller is widely watched and FHFA is mostly overlooked by national media.

In May, Case-Shiller showed a 1 percent uptick for South Florida in May and then less than a 1 percent gain in June. But FHFA continues to show declines through 2011, with a 4 percent drop for Broward from the first to the second quarter and a 3 percent drop in Miami-Dade.

Taking a step back, both indices continue telling the same story: home prices are off from 2010 — needless to say, a pretty bad year for real estate values in South Florida. But the truly discouraging news for homeowners with the FHFA numbers is it looked like a plateau might have been forming at the end of last year.

FHFA shows property values down between 7 and 8 percent over 2010 levels in South Florida, compared to a 6 percent gap in the first quarter and about a 2 percent gap as 2010 wound to a close. For Case-Shiller, values are down 5 percent compared to a 2 percent to 3 percent gap at the end of 2010.

The losses aren’t close to what the region saw during the depths of the real estate crash, of course. But for the crash to hit bottom, we’re going to need all the charts to show some straight lines before recovery can truly begin.

Report by DOUGLAS HANKS – Miami Herald

Investors looking for a good deal on an Italian property should be able to find an asset at a reasonable price, it has been claimed.

Director of the international department at Savills Charles Weston Baker told the National buyers can now find houses in the country for 20 to 30 per cent less than their value in 2007.

He explained that stricter planning laws in Italy have resulted in less oversupply than in other Mediterranean nations, such as Spain, but that the weak market has still pulled prices lower.

Meanwhile, Harrison D’Onofrio, Italy sales manager for Hamptons, recommended that potential buyers look at regions such as Puglia and Calabria.

Significant investment has been put into improving the local airports in these parts of the country, he explained.

According to the Knight Frank Prime International Residential Index, several popular areas in Italy saw house prices fall throughout 2010.

The firm revealed that Cortina, Tuscany, Venice, Florence and Sardinia all saw property values drop by five per cent during 2010, with Rome being the only Italian destination to register an increase last year.

Report – IBTimes Hong Kong