A local property developer revealed a £750,000 apartments scheme had been put on hold by his bank, while house prices at a new residential estate were slashed by more than £100,000 each in a bid to kick-start the stagnating property market.

Three-bedroom detached homes in the Ros na Righ estate at Mullaghboy were reduced to a starting price of £154,950, which is £85,000 less than the original asking price. And four-bedroom houses which might have been expected to fetch £277,950 are advertised in the Larne Times this week for a knockdown £174,950 – a cut of £103,000 and not much more than was being paid for terraced properties at the height of the property boom last summer.

And these are turn-key properties complete with garages, as Jennifer Campbell of agents Hunter Campbell explained.

"The builder in this case has reduced the prices to enable a large number of people who are interested in the development, but who could not sell their own homes, to drop their prices and get the market moving again," she said. "It has caused quite a bit of interest."

Meanwhile, developer David Hunter has called for the Stormont Executive to lobby the banks to act with urgency in a bid to prevent construction coming to a standstill.

He told of his own experience with a luxury £750,000 development just outside Larne. He had bought the site and invited tenders after the First Trust Bank had offered to finance the project.

"We arranged the heads of terms where two blocks of money were to be released. Basically there was one halfway through the project and one at the end," he explained.

The build progressed well and in September last year the first block of the loan was downloaded.

In April, Mr Hunter made the first approaches for the second payment. However, the heads of terms made the second block of funding conditional on the pre-sale of two apartments, but in the increasingly nervous market there was little or no enthusiasm for buying off-plan.

The result is that despite attempts to talk with the bank it has refused to release the remaining part of the loan.

While he freely concedes the breach, Mr Hunter maintains the bank has failed to act in good faith.

"Technically they can be right and I think that they can look at the small print for something that gets them out, but the opportunism of the whole episode strikes you when they came back to offer me money at a higher interest than what we had originally agreed.

"That was not only for the second block of money, but also for the first block of money which had already been drawn down and spent."

Mr Hunter said his own experience illustrated the difficulties in construction at present and he warned, "I know that there's a lot of people out there in really dark places at the minute who are seriously worried about their own personal situation.