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

Great little country. More evidence of the manipulation of our property market for the benefit of the few.

An Bord Pleanála’s (ABP) deputy chairperson didn’t declare a conflict of interest when he refused planning permission for a development beside land owned by his property firm.

ABP board members are required to declare material interests in planning applications under the Planning and Development Act 2000. Failure to do so is a criminal offence.

Paul Hyde, who also serves as chairperson of the board’s strategic housing development (SHD) division, has a 25 percent shareholding in H20 Property Holdings Ltd, which owns the land in question. Though Hyde was required by law to declare this shareholding, he didn’t disclose it in the 2021 register of interests he submitted to An Bord Pleanála.

You are comparing apples and oranges.

Since 1990 the population of NI has grown for 1.65 million to about 1.9 million less than a 15% increase. The population of the Republic has gone from 3.3 million to 5 million over a 50% increase.

Because of this we have a younger population which add to housing demand

1 - does that include “incidents” like the Grenfell tower?

except for natural monopolies (roads, railway) public sector spending is always wasteful. And even there is a big difference.

There is a night/day difference between public and private(toll) roads in Italy/France. Private schools achieve MUCH better results with only marginally higher spending etc

....once again, we have substantial evidence to support, the private sector isnt as 'efficient' as we have lead ourselves to believe, the private sector introduces its own set of inefficiencies and short comings, compared to public sector inefficiencies and short comings, your claims are actually only ideologically based, with little or no conclusive evidence in their support. we ve been playing this game of private sector superiority complex for many decades now, and we re still waiting for this to be proved, but what has been well proven is, leaving elements of the private sector to guide (regulate) itself via its invisible people, is a bit of a disaster, so it really is time for us to grow up and accept these failures......

This is Haughey level gombeenery! Coveney's pal also, neck like a jockeys bollox!

If we are still talking about building houses I have worked on public and private sector housing projects and the private sector jobs are at least 40% more efficient in going from a green field to houses/apts built, its not surprising, council staff don't give f#ck if the houses get built or not and have layers of middle management and paperwork to get through at each phase, private developers have massive loans that need to be paid and they ain't getting paid until those houses are built and sold plus loads of hands on experience in building houses.

If you're thinking "oh well we'll just hire all those private sector guys to work for the state and get the same result" that's not going to happen either, people only want to leave the private sector for cushy public sector jobs where they get loads of holidays, guaranteed pay rises and never have to work an hour of overtime again

So yeah in my opinion a state builder would just be a money pit, jobs for the boys kinda thing, every estate they do would be a mini national children hospital in cost overruns, variations and delays.

Plus im sure on of the big private developers would take some case against the government claiming unfair competition in the marketplae from a state backed builder or something to generate a few million on legal fees and years of delays.

London is not in Northern Ireland

Grenfell Tower tragedy was not attributable to the initial construction of the block, rather a change to the external appearance of the building as the gentrified inhabitants felt it was an eyesore for them.

Last time I looked private school fees were very high, one would imagine those fees might attract better teachers and children of the advantaged class

Finland has the best education system in the world. It is illegal for schools there to charge fees, raise funds outside state funds or charge students for any activity.

This should never of been the case. The public sector are paid very handsomely to basically be a watchdog. They have shown they cant even do this. Not one public sector person held accountable even do there were numerous building issues such as priory hall and pyrite and our watch dogs in the public sector where once again found asleep at the wheel or gorging out on fine dining with the brown envelopes they were paid with regards to building. We then had the introduction in 2013 of the BCR system where the government (Take a bow mr Phil Hogan) tried to put manners on the wild west self cert that builders had indulged in up to this point (remember a person in the local authority has to approve planning and then they have to ensure planning has been adhered to with regards to both the building regulations and planning permission) and the BCR system came about due to issues found in builds like Priory Hall where no one could be held accountable. The idea was that there was a person called a Assigned Certifyer who underwrote the build. What happened??? Well the Assigned Certifiers indemnity shot through the roof which meant an extra cost for the customer. The idea was that everyone working on the job plumbers, sparks, brickies - etc all had their own certs that feed up into the final cert. But this was challenged in the high court where a sparks messed up a fuse board and a build went up on fire. The Assigned Certifyer tried to sue and the sparks defence was - There were brickies, panters, plumbers, labourers and plasterers all on site and there is no way of knowing if any of these touched the fuse board as the assigned certifyer would of had to be on site 24/7. With this case this BCR system was now pointless and with building industry lobbying there had to be a change. So it then became the BC(A)R system in 2015 with the A = amendment these certs and assigned certify where no longer needed and effectively the wild west self cert is back in business. People can still get a certificate of opinion on compliance after a build is done even if the engineer/architect signing off has not seen one brick being laid. There is too much money in building and with the brown envelopes passing from them to government the status quo will remain.

Maybe setting up something like the government sets up a bank for builders to provide loans at 0%. The Builders provide the Government with the QS numbers for x amount of housing (and the materials are bought in bulk at that time and stored) and the profit margin this should be no more than 10%. There should be zero new housing going to REITS and say 10% given to the government for homeless/HAP etc. The rest is sold at the cost of QS/Land price/build/Profit margin. The builder saves on the loan interest and the government have the power to do this tax free. It could save going forward - But this will not happen as there are too many piggies within our public sector system getting paid off to look left when the builders are building.

im a big fan of public banks myself, including public infrastructure banks, this is more or less what you re talking about, and yes, i think this is a critical element in what we re missing, but i also realise, major private sector industries such as the fire sectors are still needed, to try resolve this, including private sector financing, but its critical that strict conditions are first put in place before agreements, such as no excess profits etc. private sector entities clearly need to profit, as its critical for their survival but theres a point where profiteering endangers all, including themselves, these entities must also be protected as much as possible from unexpected events such as inflation etc, and again, the state is the only real solution there. none of this is going to be easy or quick to resolve....

Already tried but captured by the investment funds and big developers because they have the Government in their back pocket. They now dictate everything and can churn out poor quality overpriced crap for the phlebs.

Competition of smaller developers and landlords is destroyed by gov policy and the bigger providers control quality (lack of) price and supply

I believe the much cheaper regulation in NI is provided by a private firm with there work insured. No need to over complicate and adding cost to construction

Public sector builders would be the equivalent of setting up a HSE for builders where no one is accountable, low staff morale as there are more middle managers than staff working and a ton of bureaucratic rules.

A perfect example of this that I saw recently was someone that was due a MRI scan on a wed but was admitted to hospital on Tuesday and scan had to be cancelled because no longer an outpatient and had to wait a week in hospital taking up a bed to get the exact same scan just because it came out of a different budget. Do we really want this type of sh1t when it comes to building houses generating additional costs for no valid reason.

The state should put social housing construction out to tender - but first we need big overhauls of state tendering rules, & of regulation in the construction sector.

Then the state will be the one putting the money up, builders dont have to worry about finance or materials rising as finance should be there to buy in bulk near start and store to be protected against price shocks, state land so no land inputs etc. The big problem with tendering now is that the state cannot blacklist someone for fecking up a previous state project (BAM), so companies can just continually low-ball tenders to get contract, and then make claim after claim for more money. If companies previous reputation was allowed to be considered in tender process, this would not happen as you would never get a state contract again.

Genuine question, Are our semi state bodies hampered by such issues?