“Most of them will be wiped out. I think you’ll be finding a rush of Ryanair tickets for the developers to places they’ll be hard to find in. Otherwise, the wife and chisellers will be out on the street.” (Anonymous property developer, speaking to Frank McDonald, The Irish Times).
"One way or the other, the game is up for developers and bankers who lost the run of themselves during the boom. All we now need is a full and frank acknowledgement from the Government that it artificially inflated the bubble and thus made the bust more painful for everyone." (Frank McDonald, The Irish Times)
"To save the next generation of questioning managers, we need to get to the bottom of what really happened to those who sounded warnings in the past. Launching a distressed assets "bad bank" agency is no excuse to sweep this issue under the carpet." (Gerald Flynn, Align Management Solutions in The Irish Times)
"It's as volatile as this: if just one guy on your road is being forced to sell and he slashes his price into the dirt, there goes the neighbourhood." (Paul O'Connor of MyHat.ie ... NOT. I did not say that or anything that could even be paraphrased by the 10th person in a game of Chinese Whispers as that. Grrrr: so much for getting good quality, useful information about the market out there! What I am quoted as saying is simply not true. One swallow does not a summer make, and one property transaction on a street does not determine the market. It might influence it for a time, depress it in the case of a forced sale, but the circumstances of other sellers on the street may well negate that effect quite quickly, and the overall appeal of the street will certainly be far more powerful in terms of buyers' ultimate positions in negotiations.)
"The relief will now be targeted on those who bought their homes when prices were at their peak. It will also support those who now wish to move, improve or buy for the first time. As house prices fall, the provision of mortgage interest relief will be kept under review with a view to eventual abolition." (Finance Minister Brian Lenihan, TD)
"The reason that some developers aren't interested in the trade-in is because of the stamp duty implications. They don't want to pay stamp duty on a property they aren't interested in. Delaying the payment of stamp duty will have little impact." (Carolyn Coyle, Savills)
"It's a sop to the industry, but it won't compensate for the hugely negative signals that the short-sighted Budget has given out." (Fintan McNamara, IPAV)
"There is no major benefit to the scheme but I could see how it would work in some cases. A first-time buyers' grant for one year would have been a better alternative. It would have reduced the stock and stabilised the housing market." (Hubert Fitzpatrick, Irish Home Builders Association)
"Landlords are increasingly being pragmatic about this problem and acknowledge that, as leases are long term relationships, they need to protect their investments and their rent roll. They are prepared to consider rent reductions. This is happening right across the board." (Jack Devlin of GVA Donal O Buachalla)
"That is the way things are evolving. I can see more and more people moving to this American model where shorter leases are offered and the landlord gets a percentage of the turnover instead of a rent. That is already happening in retail malls, like Kildare and Banbridge, and the same thing will happen in shopping centres." (Aidan Grimes of Bannon Commercial)
"We recognise the importance of tenant relationships in the schemes we manage and, in particular, the importance of keeping strong retailers and attractive retail offers trading. That said, we also must acknowledge the major financial obligations of the landlords and developers of these shopping schemes... In all cases we have asked tenants to provide full and detailed financial information to back up their position, as opposed to dealing with the blanket reduction requests that have been made by certain retail chains and groups which take no account of the individual trading performance of stores and locations." (Larry Brennan of Savills, The Irish Times)
"Stockbrokers didn’t see the obvious – for one simple reason. Stockbrokers are about as likely to tell you that the system is in big trouble as racing tipsters are to tell you that gambling on horses is a mug’s game. They both have to believe that the next big win is just around the corner. The truth that their game is up is as inconceivable to them as it should be evident to the rest of us." (Fintan O'Toole, Irish Times)
"Having made the fatal mistake of boosting the property market on the upside to satisfy their own political ends, we now are faced with the equally ‘appalling vista’ of buying bad assets too early with real cash and compounding the problem. We are about to unveil the most expensive ‘cash for trash’ scheme the world has ever seen, and no one is saying anything about it. The government is asking us to trust it on the price of a piece of land or a house. Why should we trust it? Nothing that the government has done over the past ten months would suggest that it could call the bottom of the market, so the potential for a monumental mistake is enormous." (David McWilliams, Sunday Business Post)
"There's definitely a pick-up, there is no doubt about that. Last week was the busiest week we had in the last year. We sold more than 50 apartments at the Waterways in the last week, which is all very positive. It's been a long time since we had that volume of sales over a five-day period." (Ronan O'Driscoll, Savills in the Sunday Independent)
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