Irish house prices fell at their fastest monthly rate for close to two years in March, meaning the average asking price has dropped 40 percent since their 2007 peak, a new official index showed on Friday. Irish property prices rocketed to unsustainable levels on the back of years of reckless lending before the bursting of a property bubble shouldered banks with huge losses and homeowners with hefty mortgage repayments.
Prices have fallen for 40 straight months, according to the Central Statistics Office, whose residential price index put the month-on-month fall in March at 1.7 percent and said the last time monthly prices dropped at a sharper pace was June 2009. That meant the year-on-year fall accelerated to a seven-month high of 11.9 percent as economists said a mixture of a squeeze on credit and vendors cutting their price expectations had put slightly more pressure on prices.
"If you look at what has happened over the last six months, we had the most intense period for the commercial banks' borrowings from the central bank and ECB, so it could be the case that the lending conditions tightened," said Dermot O'Leary, chief economist at Goodbody Stockbrokers.
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