AroundtheBlock

Finding it hard to get your foot on the property ladder in Dublin 4? Then get your name down fast for some of the new Affordable homes that will shortly be made available at no less an address than Nutley Lane, off Merrion Road.

The former Broc House, once owned by the Irish Franciscan order and bought by the State five years ago for €9.2 million, is set to be redeveloped as an apartment scheme aimed at lower and middle income groups. Originally the plan was to house refugees in the building but that didn't go down too well with the locals who fought it all the way to the high court. Though the nimby neighbours lost out in the end, the grand plan didn't work either, and the OPW now seems happy to off-load this expensive property to the Affordable Housing Partnership, a voluntary organisation set up by the State. The three-storey block, which has 30 studios, is likely to be redeveloped and possibly extended before being offered to qualified purchasers. There is also a reception area and manager's apartment which are likely to be converted.

Most affordable units that have become available have been in the outer suburbs, such as Clondalkin, Tallaght and Finglas where there are currently plenty of units available. However, it will be a different matter on Nutley Lane where houses change hands around the €2-€3 million mark. Just watch for the queue of nurses, gardaí and teachers on this one.

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 Auction rooms speak the truth on guides

How much more abuse can the two auctioneering bodies take on the subject of guide prices? With the Government still planning to set up a new regulatory body to oversee the auctioneering business, the sales are still throwing up big discrepancies between the guide and the selling prices. Colliers Jackson-Stops must have been embarrassed last week when their much vaunted Advised Minimum Valuation (AMV) of €3.5 million on a house at Raglan Road turned out to be well off the mark. It was withdrawn at €3 million and sold later for no less than €4.1 million.

The buyer is a wealthy property investor who is well known for picking up a bargain. Yesterday Colliers Jackson-Stops were at it again, selling a house on Wellington Road for €4.2 million against an AMV of €3.75 million. Call it AMV or guide price - it's the same thing, and the reality is that no agent can determine what the eventual selling price of a property will be. That is a matter entirely for the purchaser, and these days, they seem to have any amount of reserves of cash for the right property. Pundits can bellyache as long as they like, but as long as there are auctions there will be surprises.

With all the agonising over the auction process, it's hardly surprising that the Institute of Professional Auctioneers and Valuers (IPAV) feels that now is a good time to stage a series of seminars in Dublin, Cork and Galway to explain the nuts and bolts of buying and selling property - in other words, back to basics. The seminars will take place in the Hilton Hotel on Charlemont Place in Dublin on October 25th; in Cork at the Imperial Hotel on November 3rd and at the Radisson Hotel in Galway on November 21st.

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€11,200 a week for sitting on your house

What the auction prices are showing beyond doubt is that you can't beat a good house as an investment, particularly with no Capital Gains Tax on private residences. Take 15 Grosvenor Road, our front page house, which Douglas Newman Good is marketing with a guide price of €5.75 million. It last came on the market in 1997, when the current owners bought it for around €1.09 million. If they sell for the guide price, they'll have made over €11,200 for every week they spent in the house.

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Permissions reveal houses will be bigger

Apart from revealing that planning permissions are now being granted at the fastest rate in the history of the State - some 30,000 in the three months to June - the recent housing bulletin had interesting comments on the type and location of future new homes.

Planning permissions for new homes rose by 11 per cent over but total floor area covered by those permissions rose by 17 per cent: so new homes are getting bigger.

Those additional bigger houses are less likely to be built as one-off houses in the countryside, however. Despite the Minister for the Environment's new planning guidelines, one-off houses accounted for just 19 per cent of all new dwellings. The comparable figures for 2004 was 25 per cent.

If one was to invest in a new house in the coming year it would be statistically most likely to be in Co Cork, excluding the city council area, where permissions were approved for 2,282 new houses in the three months to June. Your new house would be least likely to be in Waterford city where planning permission was approved for just two new houses.

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Southerners may be looking to the North

Next Tuesday's launch of Belfast's Titanic Quarter is clearly a very important event for the city and also for Pat Doherty's Dublin-based Harcourt Holdings which is to carry out the €1.5 billion regeneration scheme. The dockside site extends to 185 acres and, in the first phase alone, there were will be about 13,935sq m (150,000sq ft) off offices, a hotel and 460 apartments. No one doubts but that investors will be moving in at the start in the belief that prices will go on a rising in the city.

However, the real test will be to see whether the scheme attracts Southern buyers, who seem to be active in every market under the sun. But will they buy in Belfast? In the late 1990s, quite a few investors tested the apartment market in Belfast, and found that rents were well short of the rates in Dublin. However, Belfast has come a long way since then and, with business picking up by the week, it seems like the the Southerners may once again got shopping up North.