Happy New Year ~ Not in Ireland!

Best to ignore the cheerleaders for the property sector
By Proinsias O'Mahony Saturday January 31st, 2009

Proinsias O’Mahony doesn’t share the optimistic assertions of some in the property business about recovery in the housing market

HAPPY new year? Not really. The banks are at death’s door. Unemployment is rocketing. Cuts much more severe than those proposed in the recent budget are inevitable. The recession is deepening, with fears that Ireland is on the verge of a so-called ‘lost decade’ growing increasingly realistic.

We’re up the creek. Auctioneers and developers, however, have a different vision for 2009, one where ever more affordable homes will be snapped up by a willing populace.

After all, construction firms cannot cut prices further as they are “down to their bottom line” on prices, according to one builder recently. Indeed, those who are “stupidly waiting” for prices to fall further should cop themselves on and realise that prices are bottoming. This stupidity has been disappointing developers for some time now. In August, property tycoon Derek Quinlan noted that first-time buyers must be given the confidence to buy as “negative media commentary force them to sit and wait, believing that prices have not yet bottomed out”. Impartial ‘experts’ have been beating this drum for some time now.

Tom Parlon, former minister and now Director General of the Irish Construction Industry Federation, warned last March that “there’s not much more scope for further cuts” and that “now is the time to buy, there is real value out there”.

Politicians, too, are puzzled by this ignorant penny-pinching. “If I was to give advice to people, I would say, go out and buy some property now”, said Galway TD Frank Fahy last May. Frank has a pretty extensive property portfolio, as does his Fianna Fáil colleague Donie Cassidy. Donie, perhaps better known for his masterful management of Foster and Allen and other show-band giants than his political accomplishments, said last April that there was “unbelievable” value in the marketplace, something he would remind us all of in 12 or 18 months “when prices have again increased by 25% or 30%”.

That didn’t quite pan out. A mule could have told you that Donie was in la-la land but he wasn’t the only one. “The time to buy is now”, said estate agent Pearse Wyse last April, warning that the “great value” didn’t “mean people can dilly dally.” “It makes little sense to hold off making a purchasing decision”, said another in summer 2007, when the bubble had already burst. “There is no better investment than Irish property at present”, said high-profile estate agent Ken McDonald in the same year, going on to ask why “we allow scaremongers and doomsayers with unfounded pessimism and unbridled negativity” to talk down the economy. Never mind, said Ken: “the Irish love affair with property will continue undaunted despite the knockers.” Hmmm. Of course, this love affair was encouraged by good old Bertie, our dearly departed Taoiseach.


“The boom is getting boomier”, he said in 2006. “We should have an examination into why so many people got it so wrong”, adding that people “should have bought last year.”

By April 2007, he was predicting a “soft landing”.

By July, he asked why those who sit on the sidelines “cribbing and moaning” don’t “commit suicide”.

Two months later, we were told that there “is no place for politically motivated attempts to talk down the economy and the achievements of our people across all sectors.” What a crock. It’s one thing to have to listen to such garbage from those in the property sector.

It’s another thing entirely when the leaders of our country were encouraging one of the greatest housing bubbles in history, a bubble whose bursting has plunged Ireland into a crisis of incalculable proportions.

Ahern is famously pally with developers, whose one-dimensional thinking seems to have informed government policy. Take Bertie’s buddy Sean Dunne, who said just last month that he was “prudent” when he splashed out almost $600 million for a 5 acre site in Ballsbridge at the height of the boom. In 2006, Dunne lashed out at the economists who had “mistakenly forecast the end of the housing and property boom in Ireland” for the last six years. This deluded bunch of “hyenas”, those “harbingers of doom and gloom”, included the Economist magazine, the IMF and the OECD. “The hyenas have stopped laughing…each and every one of them was wrong.”


They weren't wrong though – just early. David McWilliams, who had been warning for years that the housing bubble couldn’t last, likes to use the analogy of a doctor who advises a patient to change his lifestyle. Smoking 20 fags a day, the patient ups it to 40 as the years pass. After all, the doctor’s been warning him for years and nothing’s happened. By 2007, our patient is puffing on cigars aplenty and downing a daily bottle of whiskey into the bargain. Why not? Sure he’d been hearing the same old warnings for the best part of a decade… It was obvious that a serious property bust was a question of ‘when’, not ‘if’, just as it was obvious to decent economists that a financial crisis would likely be triggered by this bust. Study after study has confirmed as much. 2007 was full of guff about a soft landing even though studies of international housing bubbles show that there has never been such a thing. Bubbles are followed by crashes just as day is followed by night. The global financial crisis hit the headlines in 2007, creating a perfect storm for Ireland in the process. And yet, politicians and regulators appear to have been taken unawares. When UCD economist Morgan Kelly published a study showing that house prices typically fall by between 40-60 percent in a crash, he was dismissed as a scaremonger (it’s now very likely that Irish falls will be even greater). Also dismissed were his comparisons with Finland, which saw unemployment rocket from 3 to 20 percent and house prices halve in the aftermath of its housing crash in the early 1990s.


It wasn’t rocket science. Between 2000 and 2006, house prices doubled relative to income and rents. Construction accounted for nearly a fifth of our economy (the international norm is just 5 percent). First-time buyers became priced out of the market so banks invented 110 percent mortgages to be paid back over a forty-year period. The signs of an unsustainable bubble were everywhere. And yet, politicians trumpeted that the fundamentals were sound. What were they smoking? Other countries, of course, also had their fair share of paid housing cheerleaders. Take David Lereah, former chief economist with America’s National Association of Realtors. Lereah, author of the 2005 bestseller, Why the Housing Boom Will Not Bust and How You Can Profit From It, used to routinely trot out wildly bullish forecasts that mirrored the hallucinatory abominations of his Irish counterparts. He left his job in 2007. Was he wrong to be so bullish, he was asked recently? “I worked for an association promoting housing, and it was my job to represent their interests”, he admitted. “I put a positive spin on it. It was easy to do during boom times, harder when times weren’t good”. And now? “I’m pretty bearish and have been for the past year and a half. Home prices will continue to drop.”


Kudos for his new-found honesty, if nothing else. There are many David Lereahs in Ireland. Developers, estate agents, dizzy television presenters with their own property agendas, economists working for the banks – the same old clowns will trot out the same old claptrap, rabbiting on about ‘value’ and the dangers of waiting too long and how a bottom is near and how it’s a great time to buy. It’s not a great time to buy. It’s a great time to wait. Property remains over-priced by any conventional valuation yardstick, some places more than others (West Cork comes to mind). Property crashes play out over a period of many years, partly because sellers become anchored to old prices that are no longer relevant. There’s also a large element of wishful thinking involved – a recent US study found that people expected prices in their locality to fall but believed that their own house would appreciate in value or stay the same. The facts are, however, that house prices do not rise in real terms (after inflation) in the long run.


Countless international studies confirm this. A couple of booms aside, real house prices were flat or falling most of the time in the US in the 20th century. Booms occur periodically before prices revert to their historical mean. The bigger the bubble, the bigger the bust. We’ll still have to put up with the cheerleaders, however, even as the market deflates. Morgan Kelly puts it well. “We can start looking forward to estate agents telling us that the worst is over, a necessary correction to an overheated market has taken place, there has never been a better time to buy, and so on until most of them go out of business.”