Irish Property Market chat II - *read mod note post #1 before posting*

Timing belt

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121908962#Comment_121908962

I think the evidence is there in the fact they are not buying….why pay for a two bed apartment when you can get a 3 bed house cheaper.

it’s not that Irish people don’t want to live in apartments but the fact they cost more to build. Probably to do with the fact that about 50% of the cost is not construction

source https://businessplus.ie/industry-type/real-estate-property/apartment-cost/

timmyntc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121909845#Comment_121909845

Not buying is different to not wanting

Price as you said is one factor

Availability another - most of these apartment schemes don't go on general sale to the public in the first place

Blut2

If 2bed apartments were available for 200k in Dublin you can bet huge numbers of them would be sold. "99%" of Irish people don't have some unique physiological aversion to apartment living.

BlueSkyDreams

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121905881#Comment_121905881

I thought this also. Controls on AirBnB are already in place, no?

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121910810#Comment_121910810

Legislation yes, enforcement is non-existant.

BlueSkyDreams

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121910822#Comment_121910822

Agree completley.

But would further legislation not also prove toothless?

Timing belt

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121910284#Comment_121910284

200k is a fraction of the cost to build them. That’s like saying if 3 bed houses were available for 150k in Dublin there would be huge demand. Of course there would be but it’s never going to happen.

Timing belt

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121910050#Comment_121910050

I agree that there is limited availability to general public to buy and the main reason for that is that the developer isn’t confident that they can sell 600k 2 bed apartments when you can buy a new 3 bed house cheaper….If they were they would be built and on sale.

The issue is the cost to build and bear in mind construction costs are only 50% of the cost…..so you’re talking expensive land, taxes and regulations generating 50% of the cost.

hometruths

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121911077#Comment_121911077

Have you seen a breakdown anywhere of how the 50% is made up? It seems extraordinarily high.

SharkMX

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121906492#Comment_121906492

Would you count REITS and our own government as full cash buyers?

Montys return

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121911077#Comment_121911077

Just another question on that, the article citing Mitchell McDermott were they said suburban 2 bed apartment costs of delivery is approx 460k.

And yet when I look at those for sale only 3 locations for sale in Dublin (where the vast majority of apartments are being built) are that or lower. So even though 460k to me is still expensive, who's even getting them at thos prices?

timmyntc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121912047#Comment_121912047

The government are subsidising apartment schemes to make them viable, however I don't think they are subsidising any schemes from 460k downto 300k or below that some of these actually list for.

The 460k pricetag to deliver is highly suspect imo

chalky_ie

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121910284#Comment_121910284

You honestly seem to live on another planet 😂

CorkRed93

https://twitter.com/rtenews/status/1770070290799686122

seems good

Blut2

The figures have gotten even worse since I made my last post, so - then it was 68% at home up to the age of 29. Up to 34 is even worse, two thirds of adults in Ireland living in their parents homes in their 30s... Thats an utter failure of the state. Both for the 500k+ adults living at home, and for their close to 1million parents. Together approximately 40% of our adult population in the country.

And, just to point it out on a new page, the comparable number for the EU as a whole up to age 29 is 42% - and that includes lots of countries that are much poorer than Ireland, and countries with much higher youth employment rates. And that percentage would be even lower if it stretched to 34 years old. We're an extreme outlier.

The comparable number for our closest peer in most national characteristics (wealth, size, economy, education levels, population spread etc), Denmark, is only 4.4% of adults living with their parents. And again thats for adults living at home only up to age 29. It would be lower to 34.

JohnnyChimpo

I suppose you mean youth "unemployment" rates

Dav010

In the 18 - 23 age group, wouldn’t a huge percentage of those living at home be in school and third level?

timmyntc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915665#Comment_121915665

That would equally apply to other countries in EU, and yet we are the outlier by all metrics

hometruths

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915867#Comment_121915867

It's amazing how many stats relating to housing that we're an outlier.

For instance overcrowding - we have one of the lowest % of people living in an overcrowded household in the EU. The EU average is 16.8% yet we're at 4.3%.

Apparently we simultaneously have the one of worst housing shortages in Europe and one of the lowest % of people living in overcrowded houses.

Seems legit!

timmyntc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915907#Comment_121915907

That one was done before on this thread I believe - the overcrowding metric is ratio of people in household to all rooms excluding halls?

So apartments with kitchen-diners-living rooms and open plan spaces score worse, paddy houses with ensuites score best.

No coincidence that we have lowest % apartment dwellers and also 2nd lowest overcrowding. The criteria are questionable

hometruths

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915921#Comment_121915921

Here is the definition:

The overcrowding rate is defined as the percentage of the population living in an overcrowded household.

A person is considered as living in an overcrowded household if the household does not have at its disposal a minimum number of rooms equal to:

• one room for the household;
• one room per couple in the household;
• one room for each single person aged 18 or more;
• one room per pair of single people of the same gender between 12 and 17 years of age;
• one room for each single person between 12 and 17 years of age and not included in the previous category;
• one room per pair of children under 12 years of age.

I suspect they don't count bathrooms or ensuites as rooms!

Yes it's not surprising that we have the lowest % of apartment dwellers given that we have the lowest % of apartments.

Obvious answer is we need to prioritise building apartments - the data indicates we have enough houses and not enough apartments.

But it seems there is little appetite to build more apartments from either the supply or demand side.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/interactive-publications/housing-2023

quokula

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915907#Comment_121915907

If more people live in tiny apartments then it's a lot easier to supply housing. If everyone expects a three bed semi as their starter home, as most do in Ireland, then it gets a lot more difficult.

Donald Trump

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915907#Comment_121915907

Perhaps other countries don't give people free 4-bed council homes and let them stay in them for life even when the kids are all grown up. There are probably plenty of 60 or 70 year olds close to you in 4 bed council houses. Perhaps downsizing of private accommodation is also more common in other countries for older people when they don't need their bigger houses any more. A state would have tools like property tax available to it too. That is not really utilised in Ireland as a policy tool.

And perhaps other countries don't run schemes were elderly people can go into nursing homes heavily subsidised, while leaving their own houses unoccupied and vacant.

And perhaps other markets are not dysfunctional to the stage where a person can get a relatively low interest loan, outbid others to buy a derelict house, and rather than renovate it, can just sit on it and let it deteriorate and be fairly confident that they will get a sizeable return.

"Overcrowded" should not be something the state is striving for. So I'm not sure of the relevance to anything.

shoegirl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121898461#Comment_121898461

It was absolutely impossible to get a mortgage between 2009 and about 2014 unless you had a well paid state paid salaried job. That's one of the reasons why homes were so cheap.

And one of the reasons why mortgages here are still expensive & lending restrictive is because the ECB still imposes a higher level of reserves on lenders than nearly every other country in Europe.

As for new v older homes, where I live its still considerably cheaper to buy a 2nd hand home, but some of that is because locally they basically stopped building apartments except as part of an overall development (NIMBYs block the remainder) & literally all the 2 beds are sucked up by part V social & affordable element. So all there is for sale is 3 and 4 bed "family" low rise sprawl homes, 3km from town center. But they are also A2 or A1 rated & pretty big. The prices basically tend to be roughly the gap between how much you'd pay to bring a BER E property to an A2.

shoegirl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121908962#Comment_121908962

Census 2016 indicated if I remember right, that only about 30% of apartments are owner occupied. Read an old newspaper report from the late 90s about the various Bacon reports which mentioned that 90% of apartment sales at that time were to investors - they got considerable tax breaks for certain areas at that time.

I've noticed that apartments, esp 1 beds, in my area do take longer to sell (& are sometimes even taken off the market) than houses so I think it is fair to infer from that there is considerably less demand from owner occupiers for apartments. But its also true that most lenders won't lend to an apartment buyer unless they have a 20% deposit, which might make buying a 2 bed easier to save for than a 1 bed.

Census does have good info on this overall but if you go back even to 2016 or so when there was very low levels of institutional investment in the market here, I think its fair to assume that there is low demand from owner occupiers for apartments - unfortunately they are a highly stigmatised form of living because of the association with private rentals.

timmyntc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121916284#Comment_121916284

1 bed apartments are subject to more stringent lending conditions, I believe a FTB needs a 20% deposit if their property is a 1 bed apartment. This would also dampen demand

Padre_Pio

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121915921#Comment_121915921

I would imagine most newly built 3 and 4 bed semis would only have 2 adults living there, and 1 or 2 children. Not overcrowded by any measure.

Makes sense that most of the country was able to get by working from home during lockdown

hometruths

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121916228#Comment_121916228

The relevance is related to exactly the points you make.

We're an outlier in this, as in so many other things, entirely due to the difference in government policy here compared to other countries.

As long as government policy's only answer to the problem is to build more houses and not address some of the root causes of the problem we'll remain an outlier.

shoegirl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121908860#Comment_121908860

Actually that's partially because part V disproportionately takes apartments more than homes in mixed house/apartment developments because 2/3 of social housing waiting lists are single person households. They desperately need 1 bed apartments in particular so often these are almost entirely sucked up by part V allocation. In my area the council is even buying up 1 beds second hand on the private market to try to plug the gap. You might say "why don't they build 1 bed apartments themselves?" - if they even tried, there would be pitchforks outside the council at dawn, such is the hostility to apartment building.

Donald Trump

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121916303#Comment_121916303

Ah fair enough. I misread your post as if it was trying to imply that the comparably low overcrowding stats were showing that there wasn't a housing problem!

(I have seen posters on here complain that younger generations don't want to be packed in like sardines into their 30's because the boomer did 3 months one Summer working and drinking in a packed house in London when they were 21)