Housing/Rent

p___

howdy,
Does anyone know where to find: vacant property rates for Dublin/Ireland
A list of Zoned land that is idle
A list of Nama's sales, prices they've sold at and what's left.
Who nama have sold these properties too.
Do we (ireland) keep track of land/property ownership by organisation and is that available to the public?
The number of houses being sold in Ireland in the last 15 years- by year- just the volume.

Reason being, we've gone from a situation where we had too many houses 5 years ago, resulting in reasonable house prices and rents for the population to the current situation of high rents, homelessness and ridiculous house prices all over again.
This time it doesn't seem to be fueled by irresponsible lending and greed, now it seems to be purely greed and mismanagement of the housing stock.
It looks like the supply is being manipulated and restricted in order to artificially increase demand.

The last vacancy report I read was from 2012- Dublin had an average of 25% properties vacant at that time, so rent should have continued to fall, but it was around that time that rents started to increase.
It was also about that time that nama started to sell off large volumes of housing stock to vulture capitalists for below the market value (back of the fag box calculations). The following years saw the supply to ordinary people restricted and the property prices soar. I've read that developers are hoarding land around Dublin, speculating that the value is going to rise inline with property prices.

I'd also be interested in peoples views on how to resolve this?

The only solution I can see is some sort of property tax that is properly enforced and that is also on a scale- so if you own a home you should pay very little taxes, as the amount of property you own increases so should your tax- similar to our progressive income tax.
This in conjunction with some sort of state body that owns lots of land, staffed by developers being mandated to build on the vacant lots that are found all over county Dublin
For example.
If you own 1 house you pay point .5%
If you own 3 houses, you pay point .5% on the first, .75 of the second, 1 on the third.
If you/company owns 2000 properties you pay.5% on the first 1, but it increases up to 30-40 50% etc.
Same on rental incomes, there should be no circumstances in which a firm can write off all of it's taxes on profits from rental income against interest on a loan it got from it's foreign parent resulting in next to nothing getting paid to the Exchequer. The property tax should be paid first, then you work out your profit for paying back you smoke and mirrors loan.
To co-ordinate this you would need some sort of proper department of housing.
You would think we would have sorted the three f's too by now.



not sure if this is the right sub-forum so apologies in advance if it is

KomradeBishop

Here's a report on the vacant sites - presently 61 hectares of vacant residential land in Dublin - but you'd probably need to contact Dublin City Council (DCC) to get the actual database:
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/dublin-city-audit-finds-282-vacant-sites-ahead-of-land-hoarding-levy-1.2123606

It should be public information, so maybe you could get them to release that data - I find Irish official institutions in general, are not great at providing good/accessible data (even the CSO is spotty at this, when you try to dig down for more obscure stats, especially those going far into the past).
DCC proposed a vacant land tax as well, to incentivize development of such land, which is a good idea.

However, look at what some private developers are doing as well - they are attempting to block government from providing social housing through NAMA.

Social housing is the nub of this whole problem in my view - if private developers are displaying a preference to sit on appreciating land/property, rather than developing land/property, then government will have to step in with a massive boost of social housing - which is very badly needed, as the waiting lists for this are enormous now.

Another thing is stuff like AirBnB creating a 'grey' (legal, but should be illegal) market, that has allowed an extensive rise in short-term rentals, at a much higher rent, which would otherwise be illegal - this needs to be banned as soon as possible, to bring the rental market under control, as it is gradually taking over the whole rental market (or rather, effectively removing properties from the rental market, to go into the more lucrative AirBnB 'grey' market).

p___

thanks for that really interesting read. It's good to see that they actually thought to use NAMA to do something about the issue; makes the blood boil that pricks that we probably bailed out are trying to manipulate the market again so they can make some more money. Also good to read that the case looks like it was dismissed by the EU....now where are those houses?

The vacant property tax proposal by DCC should be adopted across the country; some of the stats in there to show how it lead to a much better use of both the land and of finances to increase productivity as a whole in the example cities.

The analysis doesn't look right though, there is a lot more vacant property than that around the city surely.

KomradeBishop

Hopefully the EU will dismiss that case from the developers alright, though I still think that's in a 'wait and see' stage at the moment - don't think anything has gone ahead there yet (and all the while, the developers are winning every second they delay the social housing projects).