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

I have made some rough estimates for 2022 Census CSO household size.

It's likely to be close to 2016. I'm not sure how someone would be able to get any significant decrease in household size.

Numbers in millions.

As I mentioned, different methods can produce different results, thus we need to understand methods, and compare only likes with likes.

Looking at this big data evaluation, the difference on population is crazy, I would not be surprise if the difference would be less than 1% (50K or so), but 200K in difference, that sound very strange.

Sandymount is beautiful. I'd pick it over ballsbridge any day.

There is talk of coastal erosion - sample https://www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/over-70-000-irish-addresses-at-risk-of-coastal-flooding-by-2050-1.4258531

But I doubt that explains the low views. Maybe young people just *assume* they can't afford it and don't put it into their searches.

I believe that 2.5 is more accurate a figure than 2.6 as I said in 2018 it had already dropped from 2.75 to 2.6 in 2 years and in the 3 years since our birth rate has decreased, our migration rate inwards has decreased and death rate and build completion rate has also gone up so like I say its definitely lower than 2.6 which is what it was in 2018. (sure an up to date figure will be release next year)

The problem with way your measuring is there are too many unknowns with the count that you are using. We don't have a count of derelict properties or properties with no supporting infrastructure, we don't know if they knocked on the door once, twice or did they count it as not being used because the electricity was cut off and if it was cut off was it because of payments or we do we know if the owners were in transit moving in or moving out of a property. Where the owners on holidays or away (Remember there are almost 40k holiday homes in the country). There are just way too many variables that could skew the figures either way. So with that said what you can measure is the current stock up for sale, rent (myhome, daft, rent.ie), the housing list and the homeless list. These 4 tangibles that when measured separately or taken together would seem to suggest that we don't have enough housing built with the right infrastructure and that are habitable to house our population so your measure is way off as you cant just include them all and say that they were all there ready with the right supporting infrastructure, habitable and unoccupied. You also only have to look at the political side of this. If what your trying to say is true and we had nearly 100k houses habitable and unoccupied do you not think Sinn Fein would be up on Kilimanjaro shouting as loudly as they can and pointing to this? This one area would IMO push them over the edge with the popular vote and they would garner even more political gains and conversely if FF/FG had this amount of properties available to house do you not think that even one politician would have the common sense to get these properties into circulation. Housing after Covid is the number 1 issue for the majority in this country

Throw in the fact that if the properties are sitting their idle it means there owners are making no money off them. You only need to look at the current rent and sale figures to realize that only a moron would do this. I don't think we have that many gobshites living here, I could be wrong but all the evidence I see and that can be measured would suggest your theory is wrong.

I think we will have to agree to disagree on this one as any explanation you put forward would have to have an explanation for the following

Housing list

Homeless list

Houses for Sale/Rent

Why have the political classes not used this figure to garner more support

Why have we so many dopey landlords and property owners in the country that in a time of all time high rents and close to an all time high for sales figures they would leave a property empty?

The only explanation I can see that covers all of the above is that we have not got enough housing to house our population.

It simply costs too much to renovate a derelict property and its quite hard to find out who owns them is why a lot are lying idle, doesn't make sense for any private individual to invest that money instead of buying new and property investors aren't interested unless it can be turned into 9 apts. Government plan is more taxes as per usual which wont fix the underlying viability issue, they need to extend HTP to derelict properties.

so in short, there is no credible explanation.

The other thing that you need to consider is that measuring housing stock at a total level does not take into account enough houses in the areas where the demand is and a surplus of properties in areas with low demand.

Likewise there may be enough housing stock based on a formula because young adults are living at home with parents but these adults contribute to the demand as they want to have a place of there own. If demand stays strong then the only way that prices will drop if there is a surplus of properties to buy/rent in the areas in demand which will lead to a drop in rents and house prices.

"population figures are incorrect and the housing stock is at full capacity"

How this is credible? It's surprising to hear this from you.

not long ago, you was confidently arguing that there is oversupply in housing stocks. And suddenly "housing stock is at full capacity" is a credible case. 

As you see, the situation with housing is complex. And might be totally opposite to initial opinion.

The denial phase.

"If you add another €1.5bn, that I've plucked from the sky, to the current transacted amount we could have our strongest year ever".

And that's before you even get into planning issues with refurbishing derelict houses, planners will put you through the ringer to maintain as much of the original structure and features as possible pushing the build costs even higher trying to meet the building regs with an old structure, you'd need to be getting a badly derelict house almost free to make it worthwhile considering the potential unknown costs.

The census is a snap shot on one night in April. AFAIK if you are not home that night your home is considered ''vacant''. It does not mean the home is permanently vacant and that there is no one living there.

The average household size in UK is 2.4, in the US it is 2.5. Probably long term Ireland's average house hold should be 2.5. Ireland has a slightly younger population than the UK and US so perhaps there is justification for it being slightly higher today.

Lets make a presumption that today we should have a household size of 2.5 and by the fact we have 2.7 shows that there is under supply today. Given Ireland's 5m population that would mean we are 150k houses under supplied today. Let say we want to get rid of this over a 10 year period as well as providing accommodation for the population growth over the next 10 years. If the population will grow annually by 50k, swell as clearing the back log of under supplied homes. This would equate in us building 20k a year for the population increase and 15k a year to clear the back log. This would be about 35k a year.

Well I won't be using that omicrom stuff to insulate my house then. An R of 2 is near useless, needs to be at least 6.