https://www.businesspost.ie/news/uk-fund-snaps-up-85-of-dublin-17-housing-estate-originally-aimed-at-individual-buyers/
I though they banned this from happening?!
Actually Cluid is interesting.
They are NGO in name at least, but they received 54million in long term financing from LGIM Real Assets (Legal & General) who invest in organisations in UK providing social and affordable housing.
Cluid is basically investing in housing and providing returns to a global asset management business - an investment fund.
So Cluid is acting on behalf of an investment fund.
Multiple studies have shown that high home-ownership impairs labour mobility and actually correlates with increased unemployment, which I've found surprising. One the studies is here https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w19079/w19079.pdf and I think the OECD have done a lot of research on this too.
My point about "rent is dead money" was that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because it stigmatises renting, normalises home ownership over tenancies, and feeds into the Irish attitude that if you're renting, you're either young or have made mistakes in life, so you deserve whatever shoddy treatment you get as a tenant.
You need more rentals to reduce the price.
Yet when rentals are bought people complain
Maybe you can show the trend you claimed?
in a working market you can buy you can sell, you can rent
you have terms on rental you are supposed to honor too
you are not really creating any labour mobility issues by having people own homes, they aren't jumping jobs every 3 months
rent is dead money, look at the current market, those with houses, while its not cheap, at least have somewhere to live
those who rent, whose future is in someone elses hands.. fooked
at least nama made a profit 🤦♂️
The government is only maximum power point tracking the population. Making it only barely worth staying here while pumping the greatest amount of money through them & making sure they get no value for what they spend
Actually, you can, and it may be profitable if you are in cahoots with the estate agents. In Montreal, the council has been frantic buying housing for the masses of immigrants and low renters for a couple of years. A middleman schemed with the EAs and came in with offers to have council raise the price of properties. It was systematic anytime bids from the city came in. The council would pay way above market rates.
There's a bizarre amount of 2 bed council/ AHB homes going up, something that they stopped building in the 60s. Once the parent has 2 or more kids of different genders they'll be on the blower looking for a 3 bed.
It's so depressing that this is still happening. There are loads of reasons our housing system is so dysfunctional, and a lot of them are to do with government ideology which itself reflects wider attitudes in Irish society towards property ownership and tenancies.
For the Government's part, I can't see this situation changing with the current parties in power. I don't know what the alternatives would do differently, but Fianna Fail, and particularly Fine Gael are ideologically wed to "the market" and the belief that it has the solutions to all the State's problems and the State itself is the barrier to those solutions. There is also no way that any Irish politician will do anything that would negatively affect house prices, a likely side-effect of any meaningful intervention to solve the crisis. They're much happier for tenants to get hammered with extortionate rents than inflict any pain on homeowners, and homeowners most certainly aren't going to show any solidarity with their renting compatriots (see the bit about mé féinism at the bottom)
Without sounding too conspiratorial, given the amount of time the parties of Government have been in power, and given that this crisis was completely foreseeable, but happened anyway, it's hard not to conclude that what's happening is actually by design, and the intended result of government policy, rather than an outlier. The Social Democrats tweeted a video which edited together clips where a FFG minister in the Dail says "housing can't be fixed overnight" for each year of the last decade or so . Maybe I'm cynical, but I do I think the Government more or less dismisses tenants as electorally unimportant "poor people", especially given the Taoiseach's proclivity towards demonising people on social welfare or living in emergency accommodation with divisive dogwhistles towards his base like announcing that FG are the party of "middle Ireland" - I thought a party of Government were supposed to govern for all?
There doesn't seem to be any urgency to solve it whatsoever. If you want to solve a housing crisis, you have to throw the kitchen sink at it, not tinker around the edges with a development here and a development there. I'm sick to death of seeing Darragh O'Brien's mug in photoshoots outside newly built developments, and he ought to be spending that time more productively elsewhere.
Prof. Lorcan Sirr of TUD and Dr Rory Hearne have been beating this drum for years, and have outlined on multiple difference podcasts the ways in which Government and civil service ideology have contributed to this mess. The highlights include:
Overreliance on developers building private homes to increase supply, instead of state-led municipal housing programmes which employ builders directly. Increasing developer-built supply will not bring down house prices, as developers tend not to build when house prices are falling. CSO stats from the last few years show that increased developer supply has actually accompanied increasing prices. 20,000 extra developer-built houses would bring down prices by 1%.
The government is ideologically opposed to state-led municipal (non-social) housing projects because they cost it as current expenditure, not capital expenditure. They calculate the cost of building a house as the number of units times the unit cost. In reality, you only need seed funding to build housing. Build 1000 houses, sell them, use the proceeds to build the next 1000 etc. Employing builders directly rather than using developers also offers more price certainties i.e. margins tend to remain stable. For builders, state developments are safer financially, and generate employment.
Councils buy 2 social houses for every one they build, so they’re competing with first-time buyers for the same housing stock. Housing output has rocketed since 2017 by 45% but the number of houses for sale has decreased. In 2017, half of all houses built made it to market, now it’s 28%. 40% of stamp duty transactions are purchases by first time buyers or movers, while the rest is made up of institutional funds and social housing. Buyers/movers make up an even lower percentage in Dublin.
Planning interventions have made building a house more expensive - the allowance of reduced unit sizes and increased height mean more units can be built on the same site, increasing land price. Planners are also obsessed with density and height, often conflating the two. You can have dense low rise, for example.
I do believe the Government's contributions to this mess are just reflections of wider societal attitudes towards property ownership and renting. Part of the reason that we don't have a mature, properly regulated, well-supplied rental sector is because renting is stigmatised in Ireland, and is seen by a lot of Irish people as almost vulgar or delinquent behaviour on the part of people who lack personal responsibility and could buy a house if only they got their act together and saved harder, as illustrated by that ridiculous “avocado toast” article in the Irish Independent a few years ago.
“Rent is dead money” is a common belief passed down from parents to their children, even though you could say the same about lots of other necessary expenditure. It conveniently overlooks the hundreds of thousands of Euro you’ll pay in interest over the full term of a mortgage. That seemingly doesn’t qualify as “dead money.” It also fails to consider the opportunity cost of tying up a huge chunk of your income into bricks-and-mortar for 25–30 years, or the reduced labour mobility and the financial vulnerability that comes with spending all your money on an illiquid asset that is regularly cycles between boom-and-bust valuations, especially in Ireland. This all creates a situation where the only way to guarantee you won't end up homeless after you retire in Ireland is to have bought your home 20-odd years previously, leading to a societal expectation of home-ownership which is a huge burden for younger people, and the system as it is only caters to couples. If you want to buy a reasonably-sized property as a single on the average industrial wage, forget about it. None of these would be a problem if we normalised renting by offering large-scale municipal housing, long-term tenancies, proper regulation, deposit management and dispute resolution mechanisms.
The commodication (or fetishisation) of property ownership along with the tying up of most of the country's wealth in property and land also contributes to our chronic undersupply of rental properties. As soon as they get on the property ladder, a lot of Irish homeowners compound the situation and pull the ladder up behind them by objecting to any future developments in their locality that would dare touch the value of their beloved property. It shows the thread of mé féinism we deny exists but really runs right the way through Irish society. We don't seem to have the same sense of the "common good" as in other countries, and we're closer to the law of the jungle that you see in the USA
its clearly obvious, the whole financialised approach to housing has completely failed!
Council buying or renting these houses at exorbitant price is the main issue.
Why there is no cap for council to rent or buy a house which is given away for free ? as this is driving individual middle class working families and renters out of the market.
how can anyone bid above the council which has unlimited money ??
a working family has to live within means with kids sharing room but new arrivals are entitled to one room per child in new A rated houses
There are very obvious commercial benefits to bulk selling properties, so I’m not sure why you label them lazy. It would negligent for the developer to refuse such an offer.
if you don't have additional homes to rent you will have high rental prices
its a sum total of house, you have a cohort who rent till they can afford to buy
having high rental prices makes it harder to save and then buy
the rental market is way worse than the to buy market because it is shrinking faster , no one except these funds are getting into the market, just as is the case in other European countries
so buying to rent buying to own, same end result
I spelled out clearly how I got to the culture of renting. People unable to buy their own homes, the squeezed middle. They can't save a deposit because of the high cost of renting. Even if they could save for a deposit, house prices are beyond them. Of course people want to rent up to a certain age and a small minority might be happy to rent their entire lives. Although we do not have the same security of tenure laws as some other countries and there are countless stories in Ireland of people thrown out on the street who are retired. The vast majority of adults over 30 want to own their own property, there's no question of that, and given houses prices a large number will struggle to get there.
You do understand that if people can't buy new homes, it pushes up prices particularly of second hand homes further and also pushes up numbers who are forced to rent? Again this is not a good thing. Do you rent by the way?
airbnb is a huge factor. Took a lot of the housing that would have been up for rent as normal. Major major factor in the current situation.
"a culture of renting" not sure how you are getting this. People have always wanted to rent, when you leave college/uni you will want to rent. People moving to Ireladn to work will rent. People saving for a house will rent etc etc
Ireland needs a rental and a market to buy.
Most European countries have a long term rental system and people have no intention of every buying.
The majority of houses have and will continue to be bought by home owners, so the prediction of majority of builds for rent and vulture funds is based on what? What trend do you see that says this? could you share?
As I said, a culture of renting is being created, in other words, a growing number of people are never in a position to buy/own their own house. The rental pressure just keeps increasing, far in excess of rental supply. Prices go up, new vulture funds etc become involved as its more profitable. They can set the price as high as they want, as they are not subject to RPZs since they are new properties. Meanwhile more established landlords are driven out who can't compete and are unable to raise their rents. Eventually the majority of new builds are for renting, owned by vulture funds and so on. The trend appears to be going that way.
This is not a good thing. Renting at extortionate prices is a cycle many people find difficult to break out of.
Cluid bought all them and I think more on that site, not an investment fund.
The government have been great in making out "vulture funds" are the enemy of private buyers when really its the AHBs hoovering up all the private developments.
The State fully or partially pays the housing costs of a significant fraction of the population. It's a bit late to fret about communism.
You need a supply of rental and new houses. Plenty of people don;t want to buy or are not in a position to buy yet. So they need rental houses.
You also need new properties.
The over the top reaction whenever any houses are bought to rent is odd to be honest and really the original article with Sinn Fein all over it says it all. Remember they are the party who have made the housing crisis worse and worse by constantly objecting to housing yet when anything happens they are in complaining about the crisis
At end of day, people need rental properties, people also need properties to buy. In the majority in Ireland for the last few years the houses etc built are been sold to people to live in. The home ownership rate is going up.
Did you read what I said? I doubt it
building houses to rent is the answer to the rental market
the rental price is down to lack of rental properties, no one else is going into this market, the base of properties is shrinking
of course the whole thing is linked, but giving out because a house goes to rental rather than buying makes no sense
Absolute rubbish. Government step in and intervene on a daily basis with laws and no-one shouts communism.
Of course they can restrict, they already raised stamp duty, is that communism too? They should have raised it to a much higher level, and removed loopholes. Also communism?
Did it ever occur to you why rental demand is so high and "fucked"? Maybe the inability of people to buy houses might be a factor?
The whole housing situation is interlinked and screwed. Building houses to rent is not really the answer, especially rented out at extortionate prices which means some people will never be able to save to buy a new house. They are then stuck in a vicious circle of renting and eventually the government have to step in to subsidise them.
People buying houses with a mortgage is the best solution all round.
You can almost see the attraction for lazy developers and estate agents. Why go to all that trouble selling to individual buyers, showing them around, etc when you can sell en masse to a vulture fund. And if government aren't going to act, there's nothing to stop them.
Here's a novel one...the council could buy them. Maybe they were approached and could not get the deal done.
Meanwhile, the council's are buying second hand homes with tenants in situ all.over Dublin, including DCC area.
How could they even do that? Newspapers (and the media in general) run stories that are critical of the government or party leaders all the time - this is not Russia. It's more likely that they have accused the private rental firm of something factually incorrect and were forced to pull the story.
people not able to see the forest for the trees
the rental market is fucked, it needs supply, this is the only game in town to increase rental properties at this stage
whether it go to private renters or social, its all one big pot that keeps shrinking
it will get worse and worse as demand outstrips supply
This is what happens when you stop building social housing
It not about the price, it's about government restricting what people can and cannot buy.
We're on the road to communism if government make laws like you suggested.
Pressure by government to take it down is the most likely answer. Because its a total disgrace...
International Investment funds seem to own most of Ireland's new commercial and residential property and FFFG are just by-standers in this, will SF if elected change this? Probably not, the horse has bolted, Ireland is a massive low-tax cash machine for these funds and SF aren't radical enough to change that and even if they did I'm sure Brussels will rein them back in....
These houses will get renters, but won't be young working families which would create a community, it will be multiple individuals renting a room each @ €1,000 per room... Or short term corporate lettings... may also be Govt. dept's/Fingal council to house new arrivals..
Prices are way too high. Estate is not a great area. On the N32 doorstep (halting site) and Darndale.
Government will throw cash at the vultures here now and pay extortionate rents