Advice on negative sale

[dcostigan]

hi all

here's my situation. I bought a 2 bed apartment in a well known development in Dublin 12 in 2005 for just under €280k. I took out a mortgage for €250k and at the moment I owe about €235k. I think the value of the apartment now is somewhere around €140k - €150k.

I'm currently renting the apartment out. My mortgage payments are just under €1000 per month (and going up with ECB rate increases) and my rent after management fee is €750. After the various managment fees, NPPR, upkeep of the property, taxes etc I reckon I'm paying around €400 a month.

While I'm not struggling too badly at the moment I do have the option of selling the apartment and my bank say they will continue the mortgage at the current tracker rate. So my question is should I sell the apartment say for €140k, leaving an outstanding balance of around €95k which would give a monthly repayment of around €400 (so pretty much the different between my current rent and mortgage/taxes)

(house price speculation removed - Brendan)

it removes the hassle of being a landlord

Any advice is much appreciated

 

[Peter Sweeny]

If you can handle the payments and hasel, hang onto it

 

[Brendan Burgess]

Hi

We don't allow speculation about property prices on askaboutmoney, so I have removed this from y our post

The main issue here is that if you sell now, you will have certainty.

If you have a cheap tracker, in theory, the lender should be prepared to give you something extra for paying off part of it early. PTSB are doing this already and maybe the others will follow. So you could wait hoping to take advantage of this.

However, it's very difficult to sell apartments at the moment, so if you have a buyer, my instinct would be to take it. If your lender introduces a discount scheme later, you may have saved some cash to take advantage of it.

Brendan