Talking Property

Falling asset values are the talk of the town, says ISABEL MORTON

LAST WEEKEND I was talking to a businessman, who remarked that our assets were disappearing before our eyes like cubes of ice melting in the sun.

Another agreed and remarked: “Each day you wake up to find that you are worth less and owe more.”

There was a time when many proudly boasted about the value of their homes and derived great pleasure from the sale prices achieved by similar neighbouring properties and indeed, basked in the reflected glory.

Like the king in the children’s nursery rhyme, they did little but sit in their counting house, counting out their money.

Conducting such an exercise these days would not be quite so pleasurable. Indeed, it may be very bad for one’s nerves.

According to the latest Permanent TSB property price index, prices are now back to levels achieved at Christmas 2003 having dropped by a further 1.1 per cent in September, which brings the total drop in the first nine months of this year to 11.1 per cent.

Not surprisingly, the Permanent TSB house price index was unable to break down these figures into different categories due to the low sample size available. In other words, there were so few property sales that attempting to collate comparative statistics was pointless.

And just to add to the general malaise, those who thought that their bank shares might have had some chance of recovering a few bob were shocked to find that the announcement of the delay in implementing Nama had the affect of knocking the share values back down again.

So, we continue to hold our breaths in anticipation of the December budget and the introduction of Nama (if and when it ever gets off the ground), we threaten to emigrate to anywhere at all (as anywhere is better than Ireland) and we take sides in the battle between the public and private sectors.

And if that wasn’t enough, we must now add a few more complaints to our list, including the increase in bank robberies, house burglaries, marital breakdown and depression.

If it weren’t all so truly terrible, it would almost be funny. Sometimes, however, it is just simply ridiculous.

The other day I was amazed to hear two men, who lived in similar houses on the same road, argue about the eventual sale price of another neighbour’s house.

They tried to outdo each other’s intimate knowledge of their neighbour’s dire financial situation and mental state, they debated over the condition and décor of the property, they battled over their neighbour’s choice of estate agent and they each professed to knowing the final (and apparently truly awful) sale price but neither would reveal it, not even to each other.

Eventually, they did at least, agree on a couple of issues; that their neighbours “bit off more than they could chew” and should never have bought on their road in the first place, that they were entirely to blame for lowering the value of their properties to “new depths” and that they had always “had their doubts” about them anyway, ever since they first moved in and claimed to be too busy to join the residents’ association.

But it is not just neighbours who have issues with one another; separating couples, who might once have had the funds to enable them to make “alternative arrangements”, are now being forced into living under the same roof as they are unable to sell their family homes.

A carpenter recently excused himself for a few days from a job he was on, in order to do some “emergency work”. When I queried the nature of this urgent job, he explained that he had to put up partition walls and make a few alterations to a house where the feuding couple, having tried in vain to sell their house, could no longer tolerate living together. His job was to split the house into two different apartments so that one would live upstairs and the other downstairs. The main problem, he explained, was that they were now fighting over which one would live on which floor.

There was war going on in his house as well, apparently, but for very different reasons. Half his family is working in the public sector and the other half in the private, and as the latter are all in the construction industry they were struggling to find sufficient work.

I jokingly suggested that more work from separating couples might be the answer, but he didn’t find it very funny. In fact, he then started to worry about which one of the couple might pay him.

Perhaps neither one would, perhaps the mere mention of his charges would spark off yet another battle between his clients.

He became so preoccupied with this thought that he barely did a tap of work for the rest of the day.

And as he prattled on, all I could see was a very large cube of ice slowly melt before my glazed eyes.