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

Partly an effect of construction lockdowns. Because during covid some Romanians and other E. Europeans got cold feet and went back to Europe when we shut down construction sector indefinitely. They were uncertain of the future so took the safe option of going back to their more familiar country. Monomaniacal priorities around so-called 'public health' having years of ripple effect unintended consequences. These disruptions to the size of the work force in 2020 and 2021 and still being felt now.

Also many people (e.g. Government supporters, business lobbyists) obfuscate the obvious direct connection between the size of the labour supply and wages which you elucidate here. They don't want other people to understand it because they want to retain the option of being able to deniably depress wages in any sector or across the whole economy - not just where there are keenly felt shortages e.g. nurses, blocklayers.

Amazingly, many Irish people refuse to understand (or own up to) simple economic principles like supply and demand as applied to the labour force.

Related:

"Micheál Martin has said halting construction work on new homes during lockdown is one of the main regrets of his tenure as Taoiseach so far."

Right but I was dealing with a specific claim re wages in the construction sector.

If wages in construction niches have become unaffordable then I would say that the contruction lockdowns of 2020-21 are even more of an aggravating factor in retrospect than they at first appeared.

Because construction lockdowns have both delayed house building and helped create a wage boom (via workers exiting the country) which makes house-building more difficult now. So that is a double hit.

You keep saying in multiple posts in various forms that ‘the per capita rate of new buyers is falling consistently each year’

Here are the per capita (per 1000 people) first time buyers since records started in 2015 until 2023 per BPFI and CSO.

2015 - 3.16

2016 - 3.58

2017 - 4.63

2018 - 4.53

2019 - 5.12

2020 - 4.68

2021 - 5.81

2022 - 5.56

2023 - 6.21

so an average INCREASE per capita of 10% per annum. Cumulatively doubled per capita since 2015. Only one meaningful reduction in 2020 (subsequent massive jump in 2021, so just a timing issue with COVID).

COVID distortion aside. Per capita rates of first time buyers have been increasing at a very rapid pace and in almost every single year since prices began to recover and records began.

I know you will now switch point to say it’s lower than ESRI suggests we need (which is true) or homeownership rates or falling etc. but your repeated statement could not be more false.

In terms of ownership, per capita rate of buying means per capita rate of first time buyers as you could have 10 million transactions of non FTBs swapping houses that has 0 impact on home ownership.

As I've tried to explain before you can absolutely have (as we currently have) significantly increasing per capita rates of new home buyers but a falling home ownership because the mix of people falling out of statistics (those dying) had close to 100% home ownership rates. It’s ok if you don’t understand that but don’t let it lead you to false conclusions.

Anyway - per capita rates of first time buying has been dramatically increasing for at least a decade. That is the indisputable fact.

Well you missed the point of the question.

And what I asked was not analogous to funding a pension. nor should it be. I was asking you to reflect on getting onto the first step of the ladder - not how far up the ladder you are now.

You arent making any sense at all. Its like you are trying to put your words in my mouth or something.

Do you want me to say that it would never have been possible for me to own a house by now had I not applied myself to the task instead of leaving it on the long finger? Sorry, I cant say that. Im 100% sure that if I had have taken the goal of owning a home more seriously when i was younger, there is no reason whatsoever that i wouldnt own one by now. As it is I still hope to own one this year. Better late than never, but it wont be the 3 bed semi that I was after. It might be an apartment or a 2 bed terrace at this stage. Sometimes you just have to settle for what you can bank and worry about the next step later.

As my Dad is always saying to me when im having a bit of a moan - "Son, it was never easy to buy a house. Dont mind all those gobsh1tes telling you people had it easier years ago. You'll be hearing the same sh1te from the people born today when you are old. We all at one point thought that we would never get there. And not everyone can afford a house, but today you can get a better one by not working than what you can get if you are killing yourself working."

The point I was making was that those who didnt stay in education or traveling afterwards and settled down with other halves were able to buy easily. Even my cousin who is 6 years younger than me bought a house last year. Why? He left school, didnt go to college, but got a good job and is buying with his like minded gf.

Im not going to sit here for you and pretend that its someone elses fault i havent bought a house yet. It doesnt help that rents are so high now and sucking peoples money from them, but we all know how we got there. All of us expect the people who caused it do anyway.

Also yes, im a bit sickened that i'll have to settle for something far less than what i want while i watch a couple of relatives who never worked a day i their lives get palaces for free.

That's the crux of it.

Mam and Dad built a house at 26 years old in the late 80's. Dad had been working 10 years at this time, left school at 15, worked in a factory and qualified in a trade with them. Mam 8, she got a good job in a bank off the back of her leaving cert. They saved for years.

You'd hardly put a dog in the house they built nowadays. Single glazed windows, uninsulated cavity block walls, maybe 3 inches of fibreglass insulation in the attic. Interest rates were in double digits, the appliances were bought on hire purchase over the course of a few years.

That was all typical for the time.

They say the same thing. Younger colleagues saying "you don't know how lucky you were". They think we're lucky, walking into fully furnished, A rated homes. Don't have to light a fire every day from October to April to heat your home and the water. Dont have to spend a month's salary to buy a washing machine.

The idea of going out for dinner back then was a luxury, maybe once a month. Foreign holidays were unheard of. People used to get nicknames because they went abroad once. Clothes, cars, "experiences" these are all new since maybe the late 1990's, early 2000s.

Again, I'm don't want to dismiss anyone who genuinely can't get on the property ladder, but people leaving college at 24-26 years old and expecting a career, a house, a baby and financial security by early 30s are fooling themselves.

That's why I have to laugh at @Blut2 statistic that home owners are getting older. Of course they are. Sure most people don't start their working lives until their mid-20s, and it's illegal to build the same houses their parents owned back in the day.

A degree back then was the equivalent of a phd today. The point the poster was making was that it has always hard to buy…..Back then it was difficult to secure a mortgage unless you had a job paid by the government. Getting a mortgage today would be considerably easier.

Your post has descended into the worst kind of folk gibberish.

Having single-pane windows and having to light the fire is not hardship. I know because my childhood was in just such a house. I also never went anywhere foreign until much later in life.

Foreign holidays were unheard of because they were expensive. Clothes were expensive prior to the late 1990s. They are not expensive now. They aren't expensive now because in the global economy we have, there is a huge deflation of certain consumer items and services (airplane flights, phone calls, clothes etc.) which are unfixed costs. While also there is inflation of fixed costs (like housing).

The former deflated costs have been arbitraged via off-shoring of manufacturing (e.g. moving textile factories from Derry to Bangledesh, in the case of clothes), out-sourcing, in-sourcing, and immigration of cheap labour.

Deflation of consumer costs has nothing to do with real wealth. If 1kg of caviar costs €500 then I start a corporation which creates 5000 new caviar farms and then I sell caviar on the market for €5 per 1kg, and you walk into a shop and buy it, have you now become rich? You can afford a 'luxury', right? You're eating caviar. No it doesn't mean you're now rich. It means the price has been deliberately pushed down. Deflation.

Now repeat for several unfixed costs, while hiking the prices of fixed costs simultaneously.

Look at a phone bill from 1986 and compare it to a phone plan for today. (You'll have to change currency from punt to Euro.) Compare it even in real terms before adjusting for 38 years of inflation.

Now use logic. If bananas, airline tickets, jeans and tshirts haven't maintained their real value since 1982 - and here we're using housing as the measuring stick for real monetary inflation, since that's what we're talking about anyway - then will subtracting bananas, airline tickets, jeans and tshirts from your budget today add up to extra savings which will pay for a house? No.

As for your mam getting a good job in the bank...that is much harder since the bank strike of 1992. Starting salary can be well below median for new employees (with college degrees). The thing of a 'good job at the bank' is very old-fashioned. It's evaporated really.

Similarly the poster above @SharkMX talking about people he knows who got good jobs without a college degree...use your noggin mate, how many good non-college jobs do you think there are in this country? Construction niches, mechanics, drivers and a few other jobs have won a mini-lottery with the wage booms they've seen in recent years, but it doesn't have a more general application. Many non-college jobs are an entry to a hard life with poor pay and no way out.

House price-to-income ratio give a good overview of the real situation imo. I'm not one for privileging statistics over anecdotes as such, but people don't even understand their own anecdotes because there are too many aggravating factors operating simultaneously.

Because ultimately having somewhere to live is so fundamental that it can be used as a real measure of monetary inflation. (Obviously food prices matter too.)

All sorts of (cost-deflated) luxuries disguise a more general fall in the standard of living imo. Cheap baubles become just become a kind of compensation package.

Holidays were expensive in the 1980s so people didn't take them.

Holidays are cheap now so people take multiples a year.

Same with everything else. Clothes, cars, experiences you name it.

“You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.”

Except now people can't afford the nest