This article is from page 16 of the 2007-11-06 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 16 JPG
THE price of property in Clare con- tinues to fall this Autumn with the latest Permanent TSB/ESRI House Price Index showing a drop of 0.3 per cent month-on-month in September.
This amounts to an average price drop of 3.6 per cent since January of this year and 2.8 per cent since Sep- tember of 2006.
“The market in Clare is static at the moment and the funny thing is that the houses that are moving are the detached houses on the outskirts of towns that are running up €350 thousand,” said Samantha Coote, of Philip O’Reilly Auctioneers in En- Whe
“So our demographic of buyer are people looking for the family home, which would be out of sync with what we would expect.
“I think we are looking at a static price in Clare for the months to come. If we are to see any increase in price, it will be very very slow and minimal coming into May and June of next year.”
Despite claims last week by Niall O’Grady, Head of Marketing at Per- manent TSB, that prices are being
artificially supported by developers add-ons, Ms Coote claims that this is not a factor in Clare.
“That is really not happening in Clare. The prices are not being skewed because of that.
‘ For first time buyers, new devel- opments and second hand houses are now on a par.
“The advice for first time buyers would always have been to get a good second hand house but now they can get the new developments with struc- tural guarantees that will be as full fitted as a second hand house,” she nee
“At the moment we still have a lot of people sitting on the fence. We were snookered in every way; we had the general election, we had the upheaval with the interest rates and now we are heading into budget sea- son again.
“Regardless of what the _ politi- cians say buyers are always hoping that something will come up in the budget so we might see some more stability into the new year.”
The average price paid for a house in Ireland in September now stands at €299,483, compared with €308,179 in September of last year.