Talk to Joe!

Tuesday’s RTE Radio 1 Liveline show with Joe Duffy involved a hunt for the nation’s cheapest brand-new, circa 1300 sq ft, 3-bed, semi-detached property. In the end, it was more or less a tie between a 159K unit in Roscommon and a 165K turn-key in North Donegal.

Strangely enough, there wasn’t the controversy, uproar or recent buyers sobbing over negative equity that you’d expect from a Joe Duffy show on the property market. The premise of the show seemed to be that if you were an auctioneer with cheap or discounted property, you could ring up and advertise it live to the nation.

There wasn’t much time given to prolonged discussion of the property market as most of the agents who came live on the air were simply reporting prices or price cuts. The one overriding message that came through was ‘houses will sell when priced correctly’ and ‘we’ve some great value down in this neck of the woods’. Unsurprisingly, Dublin agents did not feature strongly.

The winner in the price cut category was a development registered with Sherry FitzGerald in Longford that had been cut from 365K to 250K. The agent concerned said that now that the price was right, he expected them to be sold within about 48 hours.

When speaking about the need for correct pricing, one agent made the interesting observation that prices had been artificially inflated at the beginning of the downturn by inexperienced auctioneers trying to get properties on their books. He said that many of the price drops we’re now seeing are the result of these previous overvaluations rather than further decreases.

Towards the end of the show, one eager auctioneer announced that while the show was on air he had called a construction company and received authorisation to cut prices at a development by 15K. A price cut was probably in the pipeline, but this way he got to announce it live to the nation. Joe’s pride at having someway instigated a price drop was palpable.

While prospective buyers outside of Dublin will have enjoyed the show, those of us house-hunting in the pale found it galling. Obviously, new homes with a price tag of less than 200K are enormously attractive but centralisation is an economic reality rather than a choice, and for most of us, paying 159K in Roscommon would make about as much sense as paying 32K in Rudrapur.