Hard to believe but open-market rents in the Republic are now twice what they were at the height of the Celtic Tiger period and 50 per cent higher than they were before the pandemic.
Daft’s latest rental market report adds to the list of bleak news about the State’s property market.
It indicates there were just 2,300 homes available to rent nationally on August 1st, reflecting the scarcity of supply. Eoin Burke-Kennedy reports on the company’s latest snapshot of the rental market here.
In more upbeat news, Eoin also reports on how Irish economy has experienced one of the biggest jumps in employment in Europe since the low point of the financial crisis.
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Financial Times columnist Pilita Clark takes an acerbic look as some of the rebranding fiascos of recent times. She notes that some in the marketing industry seem perpetually unable to grasp the most basic elements of a decent company name: something that is easy to read, write and say, and not prone to ridicule.
In his weekly Q&A, Dominic Coyle deals with a question about how to maximise your retirement savings while benefiting from the generous tax relief, noting that one of the more attractive elements of a pension fund is the ability to take a portion of the fund as a tax free lump sum on retirement.
It’s hard to separate the reality from the hype around Artificial Intelligence (AI). Will it be a game-changer, affecting the world economy, employment and our way of life? Whatever the answers to that, AI is already having a huge impact on energy consumption in developed economies, particularly the US, writes John FitzGerald in his Monday column.
While we’re waiting for Elon Musk to get us all to Mars, an Irish computer games company thinks we should be careful what we wish for. At Gamescom in Cologne, the world’s largest computer game fair, Outlier Games attracted crowds and praise for Mars Attracts.
It’s a colorful and cheeky new strategy game that, like Tim Burton’s 1996 comedy, is based on the Topps sci-fi trading card game, writes Derek Scally, who spoke to Outlier Games co-founder Paul Forggatt.
“I’m an insurance company’s dream customer. I’ve been with the same insurance company for the last number of years. If something works well, why change? I recently changed broadband and TV supplier to save a few quid and wish I hadn’t,” Alan Coakley founder of boutique perfumery Republic of Oud in Cork tells Me & My Money.
The question facing Ireland’s financial system is not whether neobanks will grow here – they already are. The question is whether traditional banks can meaningfully compete with this new wave of digital-first challengers.
Or will they, as in the UK and parts of continental Europe, cede ever more ground to the neobanks which are redefining what the future of banking looks like?
What matters isn’t whether a financial provider is a bank in the conventional sense, but whether it can solve real problems in smarter, faster, more flexible ways that the customer demands, argues Kealan Lennon, chief executive and founder of CleverCards, in our Business Opinion slot.
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