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

We don't take the hard decisions nor are they fair. Simple example is road tax why not impose the charge on the price of fuel the more you use the roads the more you pay. With businesses fuel costs are an expense so can be deducted accordingly.

Look at property tax as another example similar sized houses with 20 mins of each other are charged different rates based solely on the value of the property. Why are two houses with access to exactly the same amenities etc charged different rates they are not consuming more street lights than the other, they don't have better footpaths etc.

Spending less does not equal votes. Its easy to spend someone else's money when they don't have any choice in how its spent. Without turning this into a political discussion we are going to far to the left in politics.

To bring this back on topic if we as a society actually made people take some responsibility for their decisions maybe some people would think twice before making some decisions knowing they have to live with the consequences rather than the rest of us have to.

More than half the price of fuel is tax

Property tax proposed by the imf was envisaged as a wealth tax and inhibitor to runaway house price growth.

I suspect our property taxes are amongst the lowest in the world and come nowhere near covering the associated state costs

Property tax applied correctly encourages older people to downsize etc but it’s would be political suicide and as such nearly all political parties are not in favour with SF being the strongest opponent

People don’t understand the reality or have been lucky to have not been impacted in the previous downturns and as a result think they are immune and forget that there deposit they have saved will be meaningless unless they can buy 100% with cash if they loose there job etc. And even if they could buy with cash would they be able to pay the bills to run a house.

Road tax is a crude taxing method (ironically the vast majority of which does not go to the road network).

Property tax is based on the value of your property (if you extend your house for your own comfort/increasing family size) your are liable for the band your house value relates to. You did not increase the size of your house as an investment opportunity, you did it out of necessity. How is it fair then you should have to pay more property tax?

Did you get an extra street light outside your house? Were flowers planted by your council to offset some of the increase in tax?

While the above may sound silly remember the State through inheritance tax still get their cut of your estate. Albeit they need to wait till you pass but as housing values increase so does the tax take for Revenue.

You are thinking of council tax which in other countries is used to fund council services such as lighting, water, sewage, amenities etc. There is no such tax in ireland.

Local property tax is not the same.

But Ireland did have a system of taxation based off rates on property ownership up until not that long ago. I mean not in my time, but definitely within my father and grandfathers time. It kept the price of property low..............my own grandfather sold a decent block of land and the story is that it was because the rates on it were just too high and more than he was able to make on it. But that obviously also affected the price of what someone was willing to pay for it. So it went for what would be now considered very cheap (I mean scaling up relative to today's prices). If it was to be sold today, I wouldn't be confident of it going for less than 750k.........I'm probably going back 60-70 years with that now in fairness.

Moving to a predominantly income-based system of taxation does have advantages, but it does shift a huge portion of the burden that would have been on the most wealthy - that being the property owners. And it inflates the value of that property too.

Well I am sure that some of the ones living in the UK might be happy enough if there was a crash here if they had a little war-chest of savings built up with an eye to moving home eventually.

High property taxes are one of the better taxes a state can impose. Its a tax on immovable wealth, so its unavoidable by even the very wealthiest - you can't hide a €5mn euro house from the taxman the way you can with other assets/income much more easily.

It has huge positive impacts on the housing market, because it reduces overall property values, makes vacant properties costly to keep, and heavily encourages people to downsize to more suitable properties as their family size shrinks.

It also doesn't discourage people from working, the way high income taxes can.

The one decent argument against it is that sometimes people can be asset rich but cash poor - two pensioners living in a house in South Dublin for example. But its pretty easy to account for that by letting people on low incomes defer the property tax until the property is next sold (with the outstanding tax + interest accrued then taken out of the sale price).

Its extremely disappointing that every political party in Ireland is still against them, it just shows how populist / lacking in princples / lacking in critical thinking all of our parties are.

Local property is used for your locality with some going into a central fund for redistribution. The property tax is a Poll tax without the benefits.

Absolutely, as economies around Europe struggle the rapid reduction in interest rates becomes more likely. Germany would be generally viewed as the financial poster boy of Europe, the sensible one that doesn’t take chances economically, so to see drops of this magnitude happening, the question is why. Is it that their caution has created a doom loop as buyers hold off entirely or is there trouble brewing and will they be in need of financial help, will this mean the ECB will reduce rates. I would say yes, this info is entirely valid for this thread.