"average Dublin house prices should fall to ‘the €300,000 mark" according to Many Lou McD.

Clo-Clo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121767346#Comment_121767346

As I said many times, the only advantage I see from a Sinn Fein government is they might, not guaranteed, stop blocking houses/apartments like they have been doing for the last years.

As you say it's all noise from the party, nothing add's up but of course a few people will lap it up because they have the attention span of a goldfish and don't want to know more

BlueSkyDreams

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121764772#Comment_121764772

The answer is clearly for the councils to start building (and owning) their own homes again, whilst delivering mixed developments. Social housing, cost rental and affordable.

Social housing and cost rental should not be sold off and kept on the booms of the local council, since they are entirely owned by the tax payer.

But there seems to be no appetitie for the govt to actually build homes,.

The govt are, in the main, just the enablers for the private sector to build.

Will we ever see large scale state delivery of homes again?

I dont know.

Wanderer78

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121767359#Comment_121767359

...again, reelecting ffg, will probably help resolve our most prominent issues!

...yes all our political parties are talking sh1te, all of them!

Clo-Clo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121767433#Comment_121767433

Not sure what the point of this post is 🤗

BlueSkyDreams

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121767359#Comment_121767359

SF likley would stop blocking permissions because it would be in their interest to see the housing stock rise, but their attack on investment funds means fewer devrlopments will be constructed in the first place, which means a decline in new homes.

Approving a new build estate is pointless if there is no money to build it and a SF led govt, through the blocking of financial investment funds, will oversee a reduction in new homes to market, not an increase.

Its a turkey voting for xmas if people vote SF and want to see more homes being built.

Wanderer78

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121767439#Comment_121767439

...as it stands at the moment, its highly unlikely any of our political parties can resolve our housing issues, no one truly knows what to do about it, due to the complexities of the problem, so anything anyone proposes more than likely wont work in particular in the short term, but its been clearly obvious, and for many years now, whatever ffg propose, or even proposed, simply wont work, and in fact, i.e. its been obvious their policies would simply exasperate the problem, and thats exactly what has happened.....

Clo-Clo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121767469#Comment_121767469

More units will resolve it.

Clo-Clo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121767447#Comment_121767447

Not so sure about that, Sinn Fein are incompetent from top to bottom and I could see them still rejecting. After all they have made excuses already that one term won't resolve the housing and they would need two

They have ran a campaign from what I can see for years to block houses, this included their stint at DCC when they drove the units down instead of up during their reign.

Wanderer78

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121767479#Comment_121767479

true, its a significant supply problem, only problem is, ffg have largely ignored the severity of this supply problem, ignoring what respected commentators have been advocating for, i.e. effectively double the figures of what ffg have been proposing, our governments, past and present, have also largely ignored the resources thats required to achieve these numbers, i.e. training thats required. so we re now left with an extremely serious supply problem, a major deficit in supply, and a major deficit in people able to build whats required, all of which will require years, if not decades to resolve....

Clo-Clo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121767512#Comment_121767512

I love the melodrama

Maybe if parties stopped blocking apartments/houses and delaying projects for years plus driving up the costs.

Wanderer78

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121767539#Comment_121767539

...theres no melodrama here, this is our now reality, again, we re now experiencing an extremely serious housing deficit, of which was actually foreseen for many years, reported since the height of the last crash, all governments since then have been deeply misinformed of its seriousness, and have been making bad decisions after bad decisions since, so much so, we actually dont know what to do next....

...yes the blocking of developments have very badly effected completions, but our problems are in fact far deeper, our state simply doesnt know what to do next, and again, that includes all parties....

...this problem will persist into the next decade, by then there will more than likely be significant social and political problems, including the potential of an extreme party, similar to other nations....

BlueSkyDreams

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121767569#Comment_121767569

It should be noted that there will be 35k homes built this year.

Thats the entire housing stock of Galway City. So building Galway in 12 months isnt too shabby an output.

It was broadly the same number last year, too.

We do need to build quicker, I agree. But if we are building Galway City every 12 months, we aren't doing nothing.

And what would those numbers drop to under a SF led govt?

CorkRed93

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121767638#Comment_121767638

why would it drop under shinners

BlueSkyDreams

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121767664#Comment_121767664

Because they are anti investment funds (openly) but they fail to see that without investment funds, most residential construction projects aren't viable and simply wont be built.

blanch152

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121766602#Comment_121766602

Once you start building houses, you reduce HAP levels bit by bit.

Blut2

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121767638#Comment_121767638

35k is not an impressive number, it should not be being applauded.

Our population increased by by approx 100k last year, and in 2022, and will likely increase by similar this year. That increase requires about 40,000 houses built just to accomodate them. Nevermind replace existing housing units, or make any dent in the housing crisis.

35k home is far less than we need. The ESRI's most recent estimate is 60k+ a year.

Twenty years ago, with a much smaller population, we were building 90k a year.

Its an utter failure of our current government's policies that the housing completion numbers haven't increased faster.

Clo-Clo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121768297#Comment_121768297

Yes it should be applauded.

Clo-Clo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121767569#Comment_121767569

Oh it’s all melodrama, quite amusing to read it to be honest.

Former Former Former

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121767664#Comment_121767664

If their plan is for councils to build the houses themselves rather than private developers, then there will be an enormous fall-off in efficiency and an enormous increase in delivery time, because the councils simply have no experience in doing this or qualified people to do it.

Maybe it will pay off after ten or twenty years but in the short to medium term, the numbers will collapse.

BlueSkyDreams

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121768297#Comment_121768297

Its not nothing was my point.

I said we should be delivering more, but some people go on as if there is nothing being built.

Dublin is swamped with apartment developments at the moment.

The 90k homes was when we had a much larger construction work force, so we wont hit those numbers, but I think we should be working towards 50k.

downtheroad

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121768297#Comment_121768297

What was the quality of those 90k units? How many of them are riddled with pyrite and mica issues. Quality, not quantity.

Clo-Clo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121769236#Comment_121769236

We still have estates gettin repairs at the moment with poor quality.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121768441#Comment_121768441

Plus the price of houses for both would increase because the councils would have to take staff off constuction companies and that would require higher wages....so instead of reducing the price it would increase the overall price per unit

Blut2

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121769185#Comment_121769185

Thats not correct. We had the same number of construction workers in 2004 as in 2023. In 2004 we built just under 80,000 housing units. The difference is in what we're using our construction workers for now - a lot more are working on non-residential building. Thats down to bad governmental policy.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121769236#Comment_121769236

How many of the 600,000+ housing units built in the 2000s have mica and pyrite issues? A fraction. I'm sure a fraction of the houses built in the 2020s will have currently unforeseen quality issues in twenty years too.

But even allowing for higher building standards having an effect to reduce completions by 10% or 20%, being very generous, would still make no difference - we're only building circa *1/4* of what we were, per capita. Thats an inexcusable amount.

And obviously wildly unsustainably low given our current population growth rate.

thereiver

In the 90s a single person working could buy a house in Dublin

now for most people it takes 2 salary's the population has increased there's not enough houses or apartments to meet demand Dublin has transformed in the last 20 years since the big tech company's arrived

There's an option to change old office buildings that are empty to housing

And it costs 250k plus to build a house

The cost of building labour materials has increased

BlueSkyDreams

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121770347#Comment_121770347

So the residential construction workforce, which is all that matters when discussing residential output, is lower now than it was in the 2000s.

Obviously with the slowdown in commercial construction from this year onwards, we should see more workforce diverted to resi, which is one of the reasons we expect to see an uptick this year.

Also, the building standards will have changed since 2004 and this of course will have a time impact on completions.

Clo-Clo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121770347#Comment_121770347

Building standards have massively increased, which is good, a house built in 2004 shouldn't need upgrades only 20 years later yet they are all required to get upgrades in a lot of cases.

The houses getting built now are at a high rating which will mean in 20 years time they shouldn't require upgrades.

I rented houses built in that era and it felt like you lived with your neighbour in some of them.

Blut2

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121770541#Comment_121770541

The residential construction workforce being lower as a proportion of the overall construction workforce is something the government has a large amount of control over. With effective policymaking this could have been changed at any time, with a subsequent very large positive impact on our housing output. The fact it wasn't done is a very clear policy failure.

The building standards changing doesn't account for our current output being at circa one quarter per capita of what it was 20 years ago. It hasn't gotten 400% more labour intensive to build a house.

BlueSkyDreams

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121772324#Comment_121772324

Other non resi projects would not be delivered though. There are plenty of essential infrastrucutre projects, aside from home building.

Blut2

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121772337#Comment_121772337

Yes, other non-residential projects, primarily commercial. Which is currently facing into a huge downturn, due to massive over building over the last few years. Dublin's office vacancy rate has increased to 15% at the end of 2023, and is forecast to keep rising steadily this year. The commercial market is in crisis.

Imagine if all those builders had been building houses instead of offices for the past 3 years? And they could very easily, if only we'd had a government who weren't ideologically opposed to intervening in the housing market at all costs. Its, again, a very clear planning and policy failure.

hometruths

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121762588#Comment_121762588

On your second point - is it that you think the ‘worst’ parts of Dublin should show bigger price differentials to the ‘best’. I.e. Dalkey should be more than twice the average price of Tallaght or whatever the actual figures are?

I'd given up looking for the article but then Browney7 posted it in the property market thread this morning!

The impact of these Hap price floors, in tandem with RPZ rental growth caps, has created an unusually narrow rental distribution for a major Western city. This should be of paramount importance to policy makers, as we have effectively regulated away affordable areas of our city.

In most cities in this analysis, the difference in average rent for a standard two-bed flat between the best and worst locations was a multiple of 2.8x. Dublin was considerably narrower at 1.7x, meaning the low end of the market was proportionally more expensive than the high end.

https://www.businesspost.ie/news/colm-lauder-dublin-simply-too-expensive-as-hap-drives-rents-sky-high/