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

I have seen developers increasing prices overnight when the HTB was increased from 5% to 10% (15k to 30k) few years ago. A good number of them increased prices of houses by 10K and they left 5K for the consumers, good guys I suppose.

Yes it does help first time purchasers in raising deposit, however that money is aimed for developers and not consumers as such IMO.

If there is a house for sale for 400k, one applicant gets a 30k FTB grant from the government and bids 430k, the other applicant doesn't and is outbid, what has that achieved? The house would have been bought, and lived in either way. Only this way it cost 30k of tax payers money.

The problem is still the lack of supply of houses. Measures like the FTB grant that don't address this just drive up prices, as anyone whos ever taken an undergrad level economics module would tell you.

That money would be better spent by the Irish state on actually building houses.

The house still has the same value.

But the Irish state dont build houses.

If the state wanted to help FTBs to own a home, there would be far more efficacious ways to do it beyond pumping more funny-money into a market already awash with cash.

The Irish state has built hundreds of thousands of houses since independence. The state was building almost 10k a year houses in the 1970s, when our population was half what it is now, and when we were a poverty ridden, corrupt state that could barely run itself.

That the state has only built very small numbers over the last decade is entirely down to very deliberate government decision making and policy.

Thr current govt dont seem to have an appetite to build homes though.

I dont see a change on that front from the current govt, as they prefer to let the private sector build and then LAs purchase/rent the properties from the developers.

And if house prices were 5% lower, how many FTBs would be able to buy one? The answer is that we don't know. It's also impossible to say that more FTBs were able to buy because of HTB. The only thing that can be said with confidence is that HTB injected more cash into a market that was already drowning in it. HTB was inflationary. Those who did not qualify for it were priced out or forced to take on more debt than was necessary.

True that we cant say exactly how many people wouldnt have got on the ladder without HTB, but raising the deposit is often the largest hurdle to clear for FTBs.

People frequently pay more in rent than they would on a mortgage, but because they cant raise the deposit, they are stuck in the rent trap.

Elevating folks out of that trap has to be a good thing, even if it slightly nudges up house prices (which is open to debate).

I can accept that. It isn't easy to save when you're paying 2k a month to rent an apartment, I would assume. At the same time, I just don't believe that handing out more money is a solution anymore. It's very easy for the state to throw money at the problem, and that's all that it's done for years. It doesn't help as the fundamental issue doesn't change: too little supply, too much demand.

32k homes in 2023 is absolutely horrendous going given we're now multiple years into this housing crisis, the state in very recent history was building 90k houses a year, our population grew by 100k in 2022, and every analysis is now saying we need 50k+ houses a year. Its like a child coming home to you after years of getting straight 'F's saying "oh well at least its not an NG". We can absolutely do better if the state applies its resources even slightly more smartly.

FG and FF have been in government since 2011. Through the last almost 13 years in power they've made an absolute disaster of housing in Ireland. SF and the other opposition parties have promised to build vastly more houses, and have laid out plans to do so in their manifestos. They may not be able to achieve this fully in government, but at the very least they have plans to try so won't do any worse.

This is it. Anyone who thinks they can do worse is smoking the kool aid.

And when do those of us who predicted 0% change in house prices get to pat ourselves on the back and give a giant well done(for accuracy if not precision)!??

Just dropped back in to the thread briefly and still seeing people comparing us to the UK? Does comparing Ireland to 1 or even all 195 countries in the world prove anything about our market. Baffling repetitive nonsense.

On second thought, I would give someone credit if they did a cost analysis of 195 countries and their fiscal housing operations over the last decade, and compare to us.

Now what happens if the central bank decides to loosen lending rules again? Now there's a scary thought. Maybe 4x lending capacity for 2nd time buyers in 2024? I could see it in the endless sea of clowns and collaborators. Can't wait to see the Central banks cut rates 0.5% only to wring almightly inflation down upon us all and furiously raise them again much further than they otherwise would have done. Maybe then people will realise none of these people have a clue what they are doing?? That's my prediction(Sorry if there's a prediction thread somewhere?)

How is 32k homes "ok" when we would have needed to build 35k homes to house our 100k population increase in 2022? Nevermind replacing old housing stock, or actually expanding our housing stock.

Our housing crisis literally worsened to the tune of a deficit of 3000+ houses in 2022, it didn't get better at all. Thats absolutely horrendous going years into the housing crisis, at a time when the state is awash in cash.

There are multiple ways to get extra houses built at a time of full employment, that have been discussed at length in this thread. Diverting the construction resources used in the last few years on offices/hotels to housing would have been the most immediate/obvious. Ramping up our apprentice and retraining programs, if begun 5 years ago, would be paying off now - but theres no reason to not start this tomorrow, the sooner the better. Or the more difficult, but still achievable one would have been to import builders, house them in temporary accomodation (of the sort being used for Ukrainians), and put them to work.

Hmm true, but the 80-90k houses and apartments build back in the celtic tiger days was possible because a huge chunk of the economy was aimed solely at keeping a Ponzi scheme on the go. Also, the quality of many of those houses was questionable at, to say the least. One would hope that modern builds are better, but we'll see in twenty years.

It's my sincere opinion that the only thing that will "fix" the housing crisis a severe and lasting economic downturn. Such an event would render the state broke, and thus unable to directly interfere in the market, reduce the population through emigration and take a lot of cash and credit out of the system. I don't WANT for that to happen, but as this has persisted for years without any real action or even honesty about the causes of the problem, I don't any other means of change.

Dont know about that. If the economy tanks that bad watch them increase property tax, income tax, another special tax on second homes, raid pensions again, reduce social welfare and so on. A crash never has only the casualties people want.