Ireland - Buying the average house in Ireland is not something the average person is able to do quite easily without a lottery jackpot payout, a marriage into money or a windfall at the stock exchange. Housing prices in Ireland have risen by 64 per cent in only five years. This, coupled with a growing population, economic prosperity and surging incomes, changing lifestyles and an existing housing shortage, has resulted in a crisis in the market.
The latest available government data, released in 2005, puts the cost of an average family home at around 272,000 euros. That is about the cost of an average house in New York.
The think tank National Economic and Social Council (NESC) has described the current housing crisis as "a major national challenge which bears comparison with other great challenges that Ireland faced and met in the past half century."
Last year, a survey issued by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) listed Ireland's housing market as its "key domestic risk".
"In the past decade house prices have risen faster than in any other OECD country: average prices have roughly tripled in real terms."
The OECD recommended that Ireland - a country with a tax system that is significantly more favourable to housing than most OECD countries - should avoid any tax changes.
The Paris-based organisation also recommended that the country improve its social housing policy. Ireland has a social housing waiting list of almost 44,000 households.
That many people are forced into renting in Ireland, is not only as a consequence of skyrocketing prices, but also rejection in the mortgage or lending sectors.
It is not only buyers who suffer. The average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in vibrant Dublin city centre is now just under 1,000 euros, according to Threshold, the Irish national housing organisation.
The non-profit organisation highlights the irony that people with the means to buy a home get more support from government, mostly in the form of tax relief, than low paid workers who struggle to pay their rent.
A survey of consumer attitudes by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) and an Irish Bank, this week showed house buying intentions among Irish consumers at the lowest levels for more than a decade.
"We reckon more significant difficulties may be faced by 40,000 borrowers who will see a notable squeeze on their spending power if interest rates continue to rise", the report said.
Housing rather than the weather, has become a point of conversation among many Irish. "It has become a kind of social pressure for people to buy a house," Garret Cahill, a 33-year-old librarian from the city of Cork, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
While many or most can't afford a first home, more and more people appear to be cashing in on the lucrative property market, purchasing second homes to boost their income.
"Certainly 25 per cent of our customers are second homeowners," according to an executive at estate agents Irish & European. Staff at Frank V Murphy, another property agent in the city of Cork, concur.
The first signs of the property market settling slightly have appeared in the wake of an initial buying rush.
In its quarterly property review, the Bank of Ireland, confirms a soft "cooling in the Irish housing market with price pressures abating, the growth in mortgage lending decelerating and house completions declining."
David Duffy, economist at the ESRI, said that the average increase in house prices expected by consumers in 2007, at 3.5 per cent, was nearly half the expected increase for 2006.
"House prices will never come down," another Irish property auctioneer lamented.
Auctioneers always get the price the seller wants, new homeowner Colette O'Brien told dpa.
"If they do not get the price, the seller just pulls out," she said.
An estimated 40 to 50 per cent of properties up for sale remain overvalued, an agent at Irish & European said.
The 28-year-old social care worker and her boyfriend waited about a year before they could conclude a deal to secure a suitable and affordable house.
It was a house-hunting exercise that cost the couple time, money, stress and eventually, compromise. They found a two-bedroom terraced house in Cork City without a back garden.
