PROPERTY CRISIS: Collapsing market 'could fall further'
PROPERTY experts have warned that buyers should beware of buying houses at current prices as the crashing market may have considerably further to fall.
Leading economists and figures within the property industry have said that the current falls are likely to continue for at least another year.
Speaking privately, even one builder said that he believed there would be at least another year of falling house prices.
However, publicly, property developers and most estate agents have claimed that the property market will fall no further, leading critics to query the independence of that view, given their vested interest in talking the market up.
But, distancing himself from that camp, a prominent Belfast estate agent has now said that property values will most likely continue to fall for up to three years.
In remarkably candid comments, published in full opposite, Christopher Pooler breaks ranks from those who have been claiming that there will be no more price drops.
The east Belfast estate agent said that house prices have further to fall and said that house sellers have to realise that if they want to sell their homes.
And, in an astonishingly honest assessment of how he believes property prices will be in the next couple of years, Mr Pooler said that homeowners holding out for prices to return to their peak last year were misled.
"I don't expect to see property rising in value for another year or two at least," he said.
Fionnula Earley, chief economist at Nationwide Building Society, agreed that Ulster house prices will probably fall this year and next, with Northern Ireland suffering much greater falls than the rest of the UK.
But she said that if people could afford their mortgage and weren't planning to move, it was not necessarily wrong to buy.
City of London financier Jonathan Davis, who predicted the current property crash when most local estate agents were still predicting prices would keep rising, said that first-time buyers should rent while the market continues to fall.
"Don't touch property with a barge pole," he said.
Bank of Ireland chief economist Alan Bridle said that he expects more falls in the average price of a house.
"I would expect average prices to tumble further towards the 200,000 mark," he said.
However, University of Ulster professor Alistair Adair said that he did not believe there would be more falls.
"There is value in the market at the moment that we haven't seen the likes of. Will it go lower? I doubt that it will," he said.
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Wednesday 15 February 2012
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