This article is from page 4 of the 2008-04-08 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 4 JPG
THE first-time house buyer has re- treated to his bunker and is showing no signs of coming back out.
That is the view of leading auc- tioneer, Philip O’Reilly who was responding to the Homebond figures for the first quarter that show a 63 per cent drop in new house starts in Clare on the corresponding period last year.
New house starts in Clare for Janu- ary to the end of March showed that construction on 76 new houses com- menced.
This compares to the first quarter for 2007 where developers com- menced construction on 211 new homes.
Homebound accounts for 75 per cent of new house registrations and O’Reilly said that the Government needs to act in order to entice the in- vestor back into the market.
O’ Reilly remarked that since Octo- ber, there has emerged a new trend of a significant number of houses pre- built around Ennis waiting to be sold off.
This new phenomenon is in con- trast to the situation during the boom
years where a large percentage of houses were sold off from the plans of new estates.
O’Reilly said that the first time buyer is waiting for the market to bottom out. However, he said that he believes that the market may have already bottomed out and that first time buyers will now get very good value.
O’Reilly said that the Government only tinkered with stamp duty, but that stamp duty needs to be removed on houses under 1,200 sq ft.
Director of local building compa- ny, Keco Construction Ltd, Eugene
Keane acknowledged the drop in the number of registered homes for Homebond.
However, he said, “Ennis is still in a strong position. Supply of housing has kept in line with demand over the last number of years which has kept the prices reasonable and below the national average.”
Underlining its confidence in the local housing market, Keco cur- rently has five planning applications in the planning process, totalling 506 houses, in Ennis (317), Crush- een (83) and Newmarket on Fergus (66).