In the above situation
@Brendan Burgess describes re trading up - and have documentation of looking to move before I applied to FSO to get tracker back and at the time I would have been able to keep my apartment to rent and buy a house locally with a very reasonable mortgage. However, I was not happy with the tracker being gone and Ulster had started letting people move with their trackers fully intact.
I was cognoscent of the clause in the contract which states you must be resident in the property to avail of the tracker and waited to move until the FSO process was finished. I was advised by the FSO it would take 5 months, it took 26. By the time it concluded the differential in house prices had risen too much and it would have been necessary to sell the apartment but apartment prices had not recovered in the same way and the differential was too much. I am also 5 years older now than I would have been and this also impacts on borrowing capacity as well as potential repayments
As the subsequent emails emerged stating the section 2 of my contract provision - I would definitely be looking for compensation for an inability to trade up, particularly as the bank pursed the case so vigorously through the FSO knowing that I should have had it back initially.
Moreover, over the period since have made no reasonable effort to correct the situation. As recently as March I was trying to move again and the bank would not budge on sorting it out. In this scenario, though the apartment price has risen, the differential is too great as houses are selling for generally 20% more than their asking price - apartments not so much and I couldn't get into a bidding war with a couple. Also estate agents would not look at you without being sale agreed yourself so there was a large risk of ending up with nothing
A friend was telling me recently there is a statute called loss of chance where you can look for such damages so with that particular evidence I think I would be pushing for that sort of compensation. As things currently stand, I would have been better off financially not to have gone to the FSO and moved without the tracker.
I would also argue that I have put in uncountable hours in terms of sorting it out - that could have been used to put towards a business I do in addition to my day job, I could have used the two nights working towards my social life, family and all other activities - I completely understand the point Brendan is making regarding you can't say everything is the fault of the tracker but the unresolved situation has a huge knock on affect on the choices which you are able to make or have to make as well as the general weight of the stress of it in your daily life -and that part is very difficult to quantify as things might have happened which you can't say are fully the result of this but they most certainly were a contributory factor. I may have ended up on 6 hours a week in work with unpaid holidays numerous years as did happen a result of the public service moratorium anyway but that would have been easier to get through with the tracker on the mortgage.
I think at a minimum - they should look at what you would pay them were you in arrears to them for ten years and give a similar sum of compensation