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

I am no fan of SF.

I think that rents must halve, and house prices must fall maybe 20-25%.

I would like to hear a politican say:

"rents are too high and need to fall"

"house prices are too high and need to fall"

Although I would traditionally support FF and FG, they will not come out and directly state this, so my support for them has fallen away.

Although EOB plan has many holes in it, at least he has a plan to reduce the soft costs of construction.

All FF and FG do is introduce schemes that add to demand, like HTB and shared equity.

A party that did something like the follows would get my vote:

savage, penal taxes on land to drive land costs down 90%

reduce finance costs massively

de-risk construction to reduce developers margins

Ok, so there will be an additional layer of cost, this new public body.

I asked the poster of this where they got the chart and they never answered.

I was suspicious about the numbers so went and had a look for it myself.

The only result I can find is a reddit site where a poster talks about creating a version of this graph themselves.

Whether it's a genuine error in trying to create the graph or an attempt to put fake numbers out there, in short it's b****x

Here's a link to some CSO data showing housing output since the 1970's. Where we are now is just a little above the numbers we produced in the 1975 and 1980. Factoring in that we now have a significantly larger population, it's accurate to say that we produce now less houses per 1,000 people than we did in 1975 and 1980.

And of course we're nowhere near the peak Celtic Tiger years of 90k houses per year.

https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-mip/measuringirelandsprogress2012/economy/economy-housing/

The only way it "works" is if all these builders are effectively civil servants and work for the state directly. If you contract out at all then you are paying for the contractors profit.

The challenges I see off the top of my head:

1) Finding all these people without just taking them from existing builders (as that will just increase the cost of building and hence increase the cost of houses)

2) Creating this government body for a cost that is below the existing margin costs

3) Dealing with the inevitable inefficiencies of workers who cannot be fired

Why all the questions when the answer is simple

Private contractors are paid whatever they want to build houses for the government

They stop what they're doing because the government pays more

They don't become state employees

We the taxpayer pay for this

What could possibly go wrong ?

There is a developers margin

There is the builders margin

SF plan is to reduce the first profit margin.

Yes, more detail is required.

I am friendly with a financial controller of a property developer. The banks lending to them expect them to make 15% net profits on the ex-VAT selling price.

Their cost of finance is very high, it is like ECB + 4% plus a 1% arrangement fee. It is not far off 10% interest rate.

It would be a great if somebody/anybody could reduce this cost of finance.

The only thing the government should be involved in is council/state housing. They need to stay out of the private housing market or they will break it, as subsidies etc. undermine the whole premise of a free market.

They should be providing cheap dwellings at the bottom of the market price. Their remit is to provide housing for the people at the bottom, who cannot get onto the private housing ladder.

Now they cannot be crappy shacks, but I think its a valid question to ask if they really need to meet all the current private housing standards. Ideally they would be blocks of apartments with common amenities, but frankly I dont know how you prevent these from becoming slums.

There is no 'free' market for housing in Ireland.

A free market is one free from government interference. Hence the term. Those on the right love to worship it but in reality it rarely exists outside theory.

We could only have an actual free market by removing planning and building regulation.

If we had an actual free market a lot of our housing problems would disappear overnight. I could buy a nice dry piece of agricultural land and put a cosy prefab on it for circa 80k.

There'd be a whole load of other environmental and safety problems with that solution which is why no-one pursues, it but that's what a 'free-market' for housing would look like.

FFG love to bulls**t about it, but according to, you know, economics, that's what a free market is.

Labour is the party you are looking for.

The Kenny Report from the 1970s is the policy basis.

So the taxpayer pays more for construction workers, so how will it be cheaper for the government to build houses then?

It will be cheaper for the people who don't pay any tax, i.e. the SF voters!

The supremely wealthy (those earning over 100K) will pay for everything, it'll be grand.