Monthly Archives: January 2013

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyv4aKJaMwU

What you may need to know.

1. Irreverent pensioners are sooooooo hot right now.

2. Terence Stamp is a geezer. He’s General Zod, for starters, and he
inspired this Kinks song.

3. Is that Chistopher Eccleston? He’s going to be on an actual stamp and play the baddie in Thor 2 (2013).

4. This is directed by Paul Andrew Williams, who did inspired no-budget
Brit thriller London To Brighton (2006).

5. This couple will only love it.

Release Date: February 22

In recent years Ireland has changed.

Once a conservative, inward-looking culture, Ireland as a nation has thankfully matured, developed and blossomed.

Great advances have been made in the fields of women’s rights, gay rights, and so on. But we must remember not to throw the baby out with the bath water. Some of our old taboos were mere prejudice, but some were vital for our national health and dignity.

Here at Broadsheet we have always been proud of our long history of confectional independence. We made no comment when Marathon became Snickers. We were right not to. The rebranding of a chocolate bar is a matter for the markets, not for editorial comment.

However, when a bar of chocolate masquerades as a much-loved savoury snack, a line has been crossed. This is not simply a matter of Taytophobia on our part. Lives are at stake.

The Tayto brand is associated with crisps. Crisps, while high in salt, are low in sugar. Using this brand name on a low salt, high sugar snack like chocolate may cause confusion among the Type-2 Diabetic community.

Enough is enough. Time for Mr Tayto to go back where he belongs, on a bag of crisps.

The property tax is a mess.

First it was to be self-assessment but now Revenue is going to send you an estimate of their own which you can then dispute.

Ronan Lyons has come up with a way of estimating the value of your house based on work he’s been doing on property prices.

A table and some tapping of numbers is all well and good.

But what if you’re lazy?

Broadsheet.ie’s code monkey webmaster Karl has  whipped up a simple form to do all the calculating for you:

Obviously there’s caveats, so back to Ronan to explain them:

Clearly, this is by no means meant to capture every last factor affecting property values. (One simple extension is number of bathrooms – roughly speaking, every additional bathroom is associated with a 10% higher price.) This model captures just under two-thirds of variation in house prices in Ireland, which – given the small number of factors included – is pretty good.
The table above is based on 60,000 listings on Daft.ie over the year 2012, and allows for the fact that prices varied throughout the year. “Aha”, a sceptic might say, “these are only asking prices and sure we all know they are ”. As it happens, some pretty detailed research comparing asking and transaction prices shows they move together remarkably tightly, once controls for location and size are included (as they are here). Properties that sell typically sell for about 10% less than their asking price, so for that reason the starting point of €108,000 is actually 90% of the figure returned by the model. The key thing about the model is what it tells us about relativities (prices between counties), not necessarily levels.
Lastly, lest there be any confusion, I offer this table as a public service but can’t offer it as any more than what it is – one academic economist’s analysis of the market.