House prices to slide 12% this year as transactions dry up in Covid-19 hit market

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House prices will fall 12% this year amid the Covid-19 crisis before staging some sort of recovery in 2021, the chief executive of KBC Bank Ireland Peter Roebben has said.

KBC Bank is the first major mortgage lender in Ireland to acknowledge that the sudden crash that left almost 1.3 million people unemployed or laid off and needing an emergency payment is having across the economy.