BELFAST BRIEFING:A judge took the side of a contracted property purchaser as he was unemployed and had no other assets

EMPTY, SOULLESS apartments staring blankly at the city skyline have become a permanent fixture on Belfast’s bleak horizon since Northern Ireland’s short-lived property boom.

From the east to the west of the city there are multimillion-pound developments, luxury apartment schemes and carefully designed courtyard gardens lying unloved and unused.

They have become a reluctant symbol of the failed ambitions of both property developers and would-be buyers, who tasted the froth but have been left with a bitter aftertaste.

Billboards in the city may still advertise the benefits of owning an exclusive residence in a premier address, but economic realities have forced many to abandon their dreams.

One of those who crashed to earth like thousands of others in the North was Neil Rowe, who is fast becoming the poster boy for recessionary property victims.

Northern Ireland-born Rowe agreed to buy an upmarket two-bedroom apartment priced at £264,000 at the height of the property boom in 2007.

He signed up to buy into everything which The Arc, a major apartment development in Titanic Quarter, had promised – including “waterfront living” in a “harbour village” community against the backdrop of a “dynamic setting”.

He paid a deposit of nearly £26,500 on his Arc apartment.

But Rowe, a building surveyor by profession, found himself an almost immediate victim of a dramatic slowdown in the local property market.

He lost his job, while the developers of The Arc, Titanic Quarter Limited, which is owned by Dublin-based Harcourt Developments, pushed ahead with the east Belfast-based scheme.

The company was quite naturally keen to ensure that people who had originally signed up to buy an apartment went ahead with the transaction once the initial apartment scheme was finished.

When it became obvious that some previous purchasers were reluctant or unable to complete, Titanic Quarter Limited, in keeping with many other property development firms, began legal proceedings.

In Northern Ireland, some property developers have asked the courts to issue “an order of specific performance” requiring that purchasers must meet their obligations by “performing” their part of the contract.

Purchasers have in turn launched counter legal claims, trying to argue that the value of their proposed purchase has dramatically fallen because of the local property crash.

Not only have values nose-dived, but financial institutions in Northern Ireland have become increasingly reluctant to advance mortgages on the original value of certain apartments and properties.

This means that potential buyers who had already paid a deposit on an agreed apartment when the market was much healthier are now unable to secure the full mortgage.

According to research carried out by the University of Ulster, property prices in the North have in some cases fallen by 35 per cent.

The apartment sector has seen one of the highest rates of annual decline in prices.

Although the greater Belfast area still enjoys some of the highest property prices across the North, it is also where the biggest concentration of new apartments has been developed in the last five years.

The collapse in prices has resulted in an abundance of luxury apartments flooding the market.

Titanic Quarter Limited is not alone in pursuing through the courts potential purchasers whom they previously wooed.

Belfast-based company Big Picture Developments, which is behind the luxury Bakery apartment scheme in the city, and PBN Properties, which has also developed apartments in Belfast, have featured prominently in recent court cases.

Past evidence would suggest that the law has been more sympathetic to developers than purchasers.

But Rowe has proved to be an exception to the case. In winning the support of a High Court judge for his plight, he may just have set a precedent for recession-hit property buyers in Britain.

In the High Court last week, Rowe’s legal team argued that since he had no money, he could not honour his contract with Titanic Quarter Limited.

Their “impecuniosity” argument, which outlined how Rowe could not get a mortgage because he was unemployed and had no other assets, convinced the judge, Mr Justice Deeny.

He refused to grant Titanic Quarter Limited a legal order to force Rowe to buy the two-bedroom apartment he had originally agreed to purchase.

Rowe will lose his deposit and may have to foot the bill for damages to compensate the developer, but he has effectively escaped from his apartment nightmare.

What will it mean for property developers who are increasingly being painted as the bad guys in these types of cases, and for the market generally in Northern Ireland?

In these uncertain times nobody is taking any bets.

But while it is unlikely that multimillion-pound developers will step into the shoes of guardian angels anytime soon, they have technically not broken the law in any shape or form.

As the owner of Big Picture Developments and Policing Board chairman Barry Gilligan has previously said, they have honoured all of their commitments, so why should they not expect potential purchasers to honour theirs?

“In all the time I have been developing, I have never had a situation where I sold someone an apartment for £150,000, they sold it on for £250,000 and they have come back to me and said here is £50,000 back, thank you very much,” Gilligan has said on at least one occasion.

He is right, of course, but the collapse in local prices has changed the rules of the game – people like Neil Rowe could move from the despair bench to become property players.