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

Our shortage of housing is good for rich foreigners and buy-to-let landlords, but bad for young adults – and even their parents.

They are a national sport, an unhealthy obsession, guaranteed to lift newspaper sales and warm up the most icy dinner-party conversation: I refer, of course, to Britain’s house prices. Napoleon’s nation of shopkeepers has indeed become a nation of homeowners, every one of us determined to acquire a slice of Eden to call our own. But there’s trouble in paradise.

New figures compiled by Oxford Economic Forecasting and the National Housing Federation prove the point: home ownership in the UK is expected to fall to 64 per cent in 2021 from a peak of 73 per cent two decades earlier. By 2012, London, for the first time in decades, will have fewer owner-occupiers than tenants. The generation promised “homes for all” may well beget an era of high-priced rents and housing instability.

Over decades home ownership has been knitted tight into the fabric of every political vision from Mrs Thatcher’s “property-owning democracy” to New Labour’s “stakeholder society”. One after another, prime ministers have promised to extend home-owning to an ever-wider circle of voters. David Cameron is no different. A little less than a year after he became leader of the Conservative Party, Mr Cameron took Kirstie Allsopp, the television property pundit, on a day trip to Chiswick to make his point. There, he explained that: “Home ownership for our young people threatens to become the preserve of the lucky few. I passionately believe that everyone should have the right to buy their own home.”

A little more than a year into his premiership, we now know this is bunkum. Mr Cameron faces the prospect that there will be even fewer of those “lucky few” at the end of his first term than when he began. Underlying these headlines are some truly disturbing trends. House-building rates stand at their lowest level since the 1920s. There are 10 per cent fewer first-time buyers this year than last. Vast swathes of the population can look forward to a life not in negative equity (they can’t get on the ladder) and not in council housing (waiting lists across the country are decades long) but in expensive, short-term rented accommodation.

Perhaps those who own property don’t object – indeed, the constriction of supply can only inflate the value of their homes – but as a national policy this is a catastrophe. Our housing market will continue its progression upwards, while failing to satisfy its most basic purpose: to provide secure, stable accommodation to the people of Britain.

And lest you think that these grim figures are merely a symptom of our more generalised economic malady, or some temporary glitch that will quickly be corrected once Mr Osborne’s Plan A kicks in, consider this: at the peak of Britain’s 21st-century boom, we were building only half the number of homes erected in the 1960s. Our housing shortage has been developing for years.

But there is a second problem which is almost greater: huge numbers of properties sold are not purchased to live in, but to speculate on.

Kicked in the teeth by Gordon Brown’s pension taxes, employers’ pension holidays and weedy investment performance, the older generations have turned to buy-to-let property purchasing to make up for the shortfall. In the past decade, 1.8 million buy-to-let properties have been created – purchased in the main by the babyboom generation. Spurred on by little meaningful regulation, standard contracts that allow landlords to jettison tenants at short notice and rising prices, the numbers will swell further.

Never mind the sale of gold at all-time low prices, this was surely New Labour’s worst blunder: to have presided over a capitalist economy in which those with money were incentivised to invest in dead housing stock rather than productive businesses. In this way, our housing obsession is harming economic recovery. But, for all his talk about growth, Mr Osborne has done nothing to reverse the trend.

Things are worst in London. Here, domestic buy-to-letters have been joined by Russian and Far-Eastern speculators who buy new homes for cash. For these people, property purchase in Britain provides tax efficiency, a safe haven and in some cases, the perfect mechanism for money laundering. In the last five years foreign speculators have bought housing worth £16.5 billion. At a time of unprecedented shortage, Britain is exporting the right to own its property. And, once again, the Coalition looks on and lifts not a finger. The cumulative effect falls hardest on young adults who now pay the mortgages of speculators rather than buying their own homes. Far from being cut out of the housing market, the hard work of the young underpins it – but as tenants they do not receive the assets.

The effects are more widespread, though. Last year, the housing charity Shelter estimated that 2.8 million people are delaying having children because they can’t afford to buy a house. Unsurprisingly, the prospect of being evicted from rented accommodation fills young adults who would wish to be good parents with dread. A further quarter of a million are delaying nuptials for the same reason – think about that when the Government next proclaims that it believes in marriage.

Millions more are trapped on council waiting lists for social housing that may never come their way. Many councils suffer such intense shortages that they now pay premium rents to private landlords where once they would have owned sufficient property themselves. That is why immigrant families are found to be living in vast central London houses paid for by taxpayers.

The Government knows it must act. So far, the housing minister Grant Shapps has reiterated a commitment to deregulating the planning system to make it easier for private developers to build; he has underlined the need to make public land available for development, too. (Gordon Brown promised just the same.) But it’s not that simple.

For one thing, it will take a decade of concerted work by private developers to replenish our housing stock. For another, there is nothing to stop speculators leveraging the housing they already own to buy up more. So the best result of what has been proposed will be that Britain’s younger generation will spend another decade locked out of the property market. At worst, whatever properties are built will be swallowed up before they can be sold to owner-occupiers.

So what else can be done? At the top end of the market, the Government could levy specific taxes on the foreign speculators. Further down the chain, we should demand more of our buy-to-let landlords. Across the sector, capital gains tax avoidance is rife – landlords, just like those expenses-hungry MPs, often redesignate their rental properties as primary residences whenever they choose to sell them. The loopholes should be tightened up, if only to encourage investment in the productive parts of the economy.

And if a generation can no longer aspire to become part of the “property-owning democracy”, then the Government must bite the bullet and create more secure tenancy agreements. We can’t expect to create a continental model of rented housing if young families can be evicted at two months’ notice, and if rental prices are not being set by market demand, but by the mortgage rates of over-stretched amateur landlords.

Here is a final reason for the Government to be bolder: many of those who have benefited most from the house-price boom are also losing out. Today, nearly one third of adults aged under 34 live with their parents. The older generation, who made small fortunes as their properties rose, look on with sadness as their children can’t begin to live independent lives. So they, in turn, have begun to drain their retirement funds, sell their houses, and do whatever possible to give their children a decent start in life. But these noble acts simply mean that only those who can rely on rich parents can own a home.

What a tragedy this is. We have become a society convinced, just like David Cameron, that property ownership is a “right” at the moment when that right is beginning to be withdrawn.

Report by Ed Howker – UK Telegraph

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

France has scrapped plans for a new tax that would have cost British holiday home owners thousands of pounds a year.

The U-turn came after intense pressure on President Nicolas Sarkozy from senior politicians representing expatriates who own properties in France.

The tax had been aimed at foreigners with second homes that remain unoccupied for most of the year.

It would have affected around 360,000 homes – more than half of which are believed to be owned by Britons.

Owners would have been charged a tax of 20 per cent of the annual rent that could have been gained from the property.

A four-bedroomed house on the French Riviera could have represented a tax of more than 1,500 pounds a year.

The decision to abandon the charge came after a meeting between President Sarkozy and budget minister Francois Baroin on Saturday.

Political observers said the fact that expatriate home owners will be able to vote for MPs from next year may have prompted the retreat.

Olivier Cadic, who represents the UK for the Council for French Abroad, said the tax would have unfairly punished British home-owners who have restored neglected properties and ‘brought vitality back to deserted rural villages’.

He said even if the tax had gone ahead, it could have fallen foul of EU law by discriminating between residents and non-residents.

He wrote on his blog: ‘It is contrary to the notion of equality that is written in to the French constitution – namely that this tax would create a special group who would be taxed.

‘I am very happy with the decision, which will be a huge relief to non-residents with a second home in France.

‘I think June 18 was a particularly good choice of date for the tax to have its Waterloo!’

Sarkozy won power in 2007 promising that taxes would not rise, but he is under pressure as the May 2012 election looms to fend off left-wing critics who say he has helped a wealthy minority.

Report by Ian Sparks – Daily Mail