There was more bad news for people trying to sell property in Mayo earlier this week, according to journalist Richard Curran’s RTÉ documentary Property Crash - Where To Now? He highlighted Mayo as being one of the areas that would be slow to recover from the current property market downturn. He cited from his research that Mayo had a large oversupply of new and secondhand homes and that, going on current trends, there was not expected to be a population increase demanding a major increase in supply. This news concurred with the most recent Daft.ie House Price Report, and does not paint a good picture as to the state of the property market in the county.
However Independent Castlebar councillor Frank Durcan, an auctioneer by profession, felt that it was not right to include Mayo in the bottom ranking counties in terms of recovery. “I don’t know why Mayo was ranked at the bottom. That did a disservice to the people of Mayo. In any of the major towns we don’t have any of these ghost estates with 40 or 50 houses in them and only two houses occupied.”
Cllr Durcan said there is a bit of a stirring in the market recently but it is only a small upshoot in interest. “I was out all morning [Thursday] showing houses and I’m out for most of the afternoon too. It’s picked up a bit for the first time in a long time, but the banks are still a major problem. I had a young couple in recently with two Government jobs and a good wage, and two financial institutions turned them down for a mortgage of €200,000. If this was five years ago they would have got €350,000 without even thinking. They are punishing the young people of this country who want to get a start in life, by not giving out mortgages they are pushing the price in the market down. They are putting people in negative equity and putting them under serious pressure. People in Ireland are genuine people who want to pay their debts and will if they can. But they can only pay so much and it’s having a devastating effect on families around the country. The only people who ever got debt forgiveness from the banks were two former taoisigh, not the ordinary person on the street,” Durcan told the Mayo Advertiser.
The housing market in Mayo continues to depress according to the latest figures released in the www.daft.ie quarterly house price report. The headline figures from the report show that house prices in Mayo have dropped 37 per cent since their peak price in the boom to the current asking price in the third quarter of this year. That 37 per cent reduction equates to the average asking price for a house in Mayo of €167,651, well below pre-recession figures. According to the report the average asking price for a one bed in Mayo is currently €86,000, for a two bed €111,000, for a three bed €139,000, for a four bed €195,000, and for a five bed €227,000. The report has also shown that prices in Mayo have fallen by 11.7 per cent since last year and are down 3.8 per cent between the second and third quarter of the year. It has also been revealed that it takes on average 13 months for a property to be sold in the Connacht-Ulster region.
