A top Irish property developer has warned a number of key developers and builders look set to go out of business within the coming months.

Managing Director of O'Callaghan Properties, Owen O'Callaghan, speaking to the Sunday Tribune, also said the recent level of development in Dublin is "a step too far".

Mr O’Callaghan stressed: "There will be blood I can tell you.”

The O’Callaghan Properties boss said he blamed "indiscriminate leading" by banks as a major factor in the current downturn.

Mr O'Callaghan's company has developed about 6,000 residential units and 14 shopping centres since it was set up in 1969. Projects which have included the Liffey Valley shopping centre in Dublin and the Merchant's Quay and Mahon Point shopping centres in Cork.

He said the current downturn in the housing market was the most sudden he had ever seen.

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Mr O’Callaghan said what amazed him most was how quickly it happened, he told the Sunday Tribune: "It was within a month. Sales just stopped. There was a lot of publicity leading up to it. We expected it to be a soft landing but it was a hard one. It was like somebody put the brakes on."

Mr O’Callaghan’s main assumption is that individuals who offered "crazy and unrealistic prices" for the properties "will be gone," and added: 'Some people forget about real life."

Although Mr O’Callaghan said the fall in house prices was necessary to correct the marker.

He believes prices will level off this summer and that there will be a "sensible" rise in house prices within the next 12 months.

Mr O’Callaghan said a lot of "speculators who thought they were developers" have been lost and lessons have been learned.

It is the lending policies of financial institutions that Mr O’Callaghan feels should take some of the blame for the current downturn in the housing market.

"The reason for this is banks giving out too much money to people who knew absolutely nothing about housing development, allowing people to get involved in the business who should not be involved in it, professionals in particular, who were paying too much for land, adding it to the house prices and killing the market," he said.

O'Callaghan claimed the commercial property market had yet to be affected by the downturn but that the development land market is "dead" at the moment.

(PR)