Not funny at all...

We’ve come from here…

Almost one in 10 Irish mortgages is in arrears or has been rescheduled, according to the latest figures from the Central Bank.
Over 40,000 mortgages, or 5.1 per cent, were in arrears for over 90 days at the end of September up from 26,000 a year ago. In 28,000 of these, the arrears were over 180 days.
For the first time, the bank has published an estimate of the number of rescheduled mortgages, at 45,000. Two-thirds of these restructured mortgages are paying at least the full interest, the bank estimates.
Since there is an overlap between mortgages in arrears and rescheduled cases, the bank estimates that a total of 70,000 mortgages are either in arrears or have been rescheduled.

to here…

The mortgage arrears crisis is deepening as new Central Bank figures show there were nearly 78,000 mortgages in arrears of 90 days or more at the end of March in an increase of nearly 8,000 over just three months.
All told, the number of mortgages which are in arrears or have had to be restructured in some way was 15.2 per cent of the total residential market at the end of March, up from 14 per cent at the end of last year.
The latest figures also show that there were a total of 170 properties repossessed by lenders during the first quarter of the year, an increase of 28 per cent from the final quarter of 2011.

And all in the space of less than 18 months… Alan McQuaid of Bloxham made the following point in relation to reports that property prices fell 16.4% in the year to April nationwide (while in Dublin they registered a 0.2 increase from March to April) which is equally applicable to mortgages.

“Although the March/April data for Dublin are a step in the right direction we don’t anticipate any significant improvement in the overall country-wide housing market until the employment situation gets better and we see a return to some sort of ‘normal’ credit lending from the banks, which still seems a long way off,” Mr McQuaid wrote in a note.

“A lot has been written recently about houses now being affordable again, but in our view that is irrelevant if you have an unemployment rate of over 14 per cent and no real sings of it improving. Following the drop of almost 13 per cent in house prices in 2011, we are now looking for another double-digit decline in 2012.“

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