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THIS WEEK THERE was some tentatively good news for house buyers.

New figures showed that house prices fell in the capital (although they did grow across the country).

The Central Bank also revealed that seven unnamed banks had not been treating mortgage lenders fairly.

Here’s what’s been happening in property news.

The Big Movers

House prices

The most recent property index from the Central Statistics Office published this week has shown a 1.1% increase in the price of houses outside Dublin compared to a 0.1% decrease in the capital.

Estate agent Savills predicts that the effects of the recently-introduced Central Bank mortgage rules will become clearer from September onwards, with people who agreed terms before January no longer appearing significantly in the statistics.

A spokesperson for the group said, “In the longer term, there could be an offsetting pick-up in investor activity as rising rents are making buy-to-let returns look increasingly more attractive than bank deposits.”

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Ripped off?

This week the Central Bank issued a statement saying that certain lending institutions had been found to have “weaknesses” in the ways that they dealt with customers.

It was found that seven institutes which together cover around 80% of the mortgage lending market were not meeting their obligations under the Central Bank’s Code of Conduct on Mortgage Arrears (CCMA).

Areas where lending institutions were found to fail included not making borrowers aware of all options available to them, continuing with legal action against borrowers after an alternative repayment arrangement had been agreed and banks contacting lenders directly after third party legal representation had been nominated to act on their behalf.

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Under Construction

• Five retail parks located in different areas across the country have come onto the market with a collective pricetag of €162 million. 
• Swedish furniture fans rejoice: Ikea has announced that it will be setting up a network of high street stores.   

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• The world’s biggest cattle ranch, Anne Creek, has come onto the market in Australia.
• It has been announced that it will cost customers of Irish Water €100 to have their meters read if they feel it is giving an incorrect reading.  

Des Res

If you were going to choose a method to have your house designed, crowdsourcing probably wouldn’t be it. However, that is exactly what has happened for this project in Sweden, which used data collected from more than 200 million clicks to come up with an originally designed house, reports Business Insider. The results are not as bad as you might think.