It's amusing , this rush to sell by the owners of second-hand houses. Given the market is overloaded, some sellers are having to drop their prices, to achieve a sale. Of course, they may not reveal the discount to their neighbours, thereby perpetuating the fiction that higher prices are being achieved.
The neighbours are not fooled, but are in denial, because they are in a panic. The result, as one estate put it to me this week, is a wholesale rush to dispose of second-hand houses, in spite of a glut on the market. It's hard, too, to have sympathy for the laggards who are making fools of themselves by rushing to sell when the market has peaked.
This week I saw two identical 'For Sale' signs on neighbours' houses. In another street, three signs, next door to each other. In adjoining streets of terraced red-bricks, there is a rash of 'For Sale' signs, amounting to a contagion, that is becoming an epidemic.
The vendors are in cloud-cuckoo land and will likely pay the (discounted) price of their own indecision. Try as I might, I cannot lose sleep over them - 'fortune favours the brave', as we heard ad nauseam during the recent baiting by the classically educated Gonzaga boy of the Northside mendicant. It's as true now as when devised and all too knowingly true in the bank balances of those who had the bottle to sell earlier....
Now, it's probably too late to realise the massive profits of recent years. It was put to me graphically by one estate agent: "In the past three months, I sold three identical houses in the same street. The prices were - €1.5m, €1.4.m, €1.1m - in that declining order per month. The market peaked in June and had been in decline since - but sellers have panicked. There's no telling them to wait."
As this agent sees it, unless they are prepared to drop their expectations, by €50,000-€100,000, they are going to be left with the property on their hands.
Shrewd buyers know this and, with so many choices, are expecting a substantial discount. The knock-on effect will be felt across the board, as potential buyers, selling their own homes, will not get the prices they, in turn, expect.
For investing landlords, it's a different matter. We can afford to wait and be amused at some of the transparently comic attempts to tart-up properties in a vain attempt to beat the panic. Here's some of what I saw, in a cursory look, during the week-end.
One end-of-terrace house (circa 1900) had the stain marks of rising damp on the outside. On inspection, the interior walls showed no such marks. The entire inside had been stud-boarded to conceal the damp. Instead of hacking away the old drummy plaster and replastering (which takes months to dry), the vendor had gone for the quick-fix of stud-boarding interior walls.
A naive purchaser may be puzzled in a year's time, when the smell asserts itself, and he will not be easily able to source the discontent, festering away in seeping damp behind wall-to-wall stud-board. But his family might feel it, wheezing with bronchitis into winter.
Another house, another panic measure. A 'new' kitchen had laminate wooden flooring below the sink area. Do I win any prizes for knowing that - outside of the bathroom - the kitchen is likely to see most spills during the average family activity?
In a variation of the old Irish salutation , the laminate floor will rise to meet the new owner.
And so on, in a tour of second-hand properties I came across the risible, the outlandish and the plain absurd.
Large front bedrooms hastily divided into two - yer only man, the reliable stud-board again in play (knock, knock. Who's there? I'm the Granny, they left without me! )
The best was an en-suite shower put into a Victorian bedroom. You could see the marks where the old mahogany wardrobe had been taken out.
Oddly enough, if I were a buyer of a period house, I would prefer to wash in the wardrobe than risk stepping into that weird concoction put in its place.
