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

From the Irish Times... Seems plausible

Do’nt feel too down. The people walking around with BT bags represent about .00001 % - rough calculation- of the population

Do the anti-sinners accept that if more houses are built, and supply was to actually meets demand, that there will be a huge danger of many, many people ending in negative equity as housing is completely overpriced at present?

Like, I have a relative in Bray who's very normal 3 bed semi, built in the 70's is worth over 500,000. I remember it was valued in the 90's at 50,000. I can't think of any other common item that has increased ten fold in the last 30 years.

Was the country destroyed and everyone out of work when houses in Bray were 50K?

I don't think so.

The supply side is largely the solution. That takes time, a lot of it. We are getting there, slowly. A lot of people without children should be aiming at apartment living, whether owned or rented long term.

So the govt debt (which FF/FG would have been charge of has put us in debt up to our necks, and the answer to that is vote them in again?

Riiiiight

I think the issue a lot of people on this thread have is that the one doing the most complaining is doing the least amount of struggling.

Supply of what though? If social housing is anything better than "as cheap as possible" then it will destroy the whole housing market and potentially crash the economy again.

The problem is that, under the current regulations, "as cheap as possible" is minimum code, which still works out at ~€370K.

If you start giving away 3 bed semis in desirable areas for lower than cost price, you will destroy the market totally. This will be great news for the people who are trying to enter the market, but ruin the lives of the vast majority of people who already own a house.

Doing away with bed-sits was an example of how raising the standards can have negative knock-on effects. Students should all be living in specifically designed shared student dorms in areas adjacent to the main universities instead of taking up family homes. All this has a knock-on effect in the market. Students dont need to live in family homes, families do.

Maybe start by telling us what the differences in building costs are? Then we might get somewhere comparing different countries to each other.

I showed above where the SCSI attribute 100k of the building cost of a unit to the raw land component. That would correspond to 44k (punts) in 1995 discounted by the CPI. The Euro equivalent is approximately 56k. The average house price back then, according to the CPI, was 76k.

132k (punts) in 1995 is equivalent to 300k today. Which you propose as the modern day cost to build a "shell of a house".

Here is a simple point, which I am surprised that many can't grasp. You can have a field which is worth 10k per acre. The local council makes an arbitrary administrative decision to zone that field for residential. It is now worth (for arguments sake) 1m an acre.

Why is it suddenly worth 1m? It's because that is what someone is willing to pay for it. Why are they willing to pay the 1m? Because they do their sums and know that I can sell the finished product for X, it will cost me Y to manufacture it, therefore I can pay up to (X-Y)= Z for the input and still make money.

What is the relevance? Well people on here appear to think that X is fixed by some fundamental law of physics. It isn't. And if X comes down, then Z can come down as well. And portions of the Y can also come down, but even without getting into that, there is still room for X to come down.

Below is the image of a site that the LDA recently bought from NAMA for 44m. A developer had been due to buy it at 45m up to last year, but then pulled out. There is no fundamental reason why that land should be valued at 44m vs 34m or even 4m. As you can see, there is plenty of other vacant land sitting there too. And before you go off on a tangent, I am not proposing that the developers get cheap land or anything of the sort. I am simply making the point that there is scope for the price of the end product to reduce.