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

With all that's going on this is fairly mental

If you are young in Ireland, you are probably asset poor but with a lifetime of earning potential ahead of you to accumulate wealth. You should therefore, if voting in self interest, be supportive of massively increasing taxes on existing wealth (property taxes being the most effective), and lower income taxes to better enable you to build your own wealth.

If you are old, you are likely asset rich but with your earning days largely behind you. You should want higher income taxes on the generation coming after you but the abolition of any wealth taxes which would impact you.

Sinn Fein are in the latter camp. Their main policies are to eliminate the only wealth tax we have. To increase income taxes. They want to decrease the amount people can put into pensions going forward (this doesn’t impact older people who already have their pensions, only young people who still need to build theirs).

Their policies on the key issues are remarkably pro - older established wealth and anti young people striving to earn a better future.

Yet all our young people are voting for them. It is quite bizarre.

Absolutely. There seems to be this sense of ‘it can’t possibly be worse’ so I’ll just vote for someone else irrespective of what that alternative actually proposes to do.

It tends to be the case, across the world, that it’s easier to build support in opposition and the sitting government loses support over time.

Either all governments we elect are bad. Or people are easily swayed by big promises from those who don’t need to deliver anything (€300k houses in Dublin for all!). My guess is it’s the latter!

I don't suppose anyone is going to get elected by promising a balanced budget (and all that that entails) and personal responsibility anytime soon.

There are building sites up and down the country as it is. The surplus budget is just meaningless funny money. It doesn't translate into resources, and even if it did, we're not going to go from building 35k houses in one year to 100k next year.

Look, everyone know it's just just a case of building more houses, and pretending that it is is simply dishonest.

The surplus budget is billions of euros per year, its not remotely funny money. Its real money, that can be used to solve real problems.

We were building 90,000 housing units a year fifteen years ago, when our population was 25% lower than it is now. We'd need to be building 110k units a year to compare per capita. Its completely possible to build massively more housing, if we allocate the resources to do so.

We built 32,000 housing units in 2023, and 30,000 in 2022. The goal is 33.5k in 2024. Our current government's housing for all program calls for an average 33k housing units to be completed every year from now until 2030.

90,000 was obviously too much with hindsight, but 33,000 is also very obviously too little at present. The ESRI estimates we need 60k per year this decade. That can't be achieved instantly no, but our government should at the very least be aiming to achieve that within a 3-4 year window, but its not. Thats the problem. We're never going to build enough houses if the government doesn't even aim to do so.

90k houses a year was possible when the economy was essentially geared towards building. That's not the case today. If we want to build tens of thousands of houses more each year, we would need many more tens of thousands of builders to come and build them. Where will they live?

Okay, I didn't actually know that. Thank you.

However, I think that more builders would be needed to build more houses. Can the current non-housing projects simply cease? Probably not...

That Graph and the CSO data both tell us that the numbers in construction are 25% lower from their peak in 07/08. That would mean that if we were building 07/08 standards and majority were employed in housing you would expect 60k of houses a year. If you are building A rated housing units as opposed to 07/08 standards, I wound imagine this number would be lower again.

We built 90k houses at the peak, 25% less than that would have us at over 70k per year.

You can absolutely take some off that for higher building standards now on top, but no more than additional 10-20%, considering we've also had technological advances in the industry in the last two decades that help compensate for some of that.

So if we had a similar allocation ratio of construction workers to housing we would be hitting approx 60k. But instead at present we're at approx 30k, because not enough of our construction workers are building housing. Thats a major problem in allocation of resources.

Building more is the #1 solution, though. Everything else is marginal in comparison. If the Irish state was building 60k+ houses a year, every year, the housing market would be much much less problematic.

The ESRI estimation, a fairly well informed and neutral one, is now 60k a year is whats required also, 45k comes nowhere close.

The planet where you can get 40%. Seriously, the profit would vary from project to project, and what's calculated at the start of a build is probably very different from the end of a build.

The 30% could be gross margin, before the cost of running the business is paid.

Again, hearsay, but there were plenty of reports of builders asking for more money from buyers after deposits were paid, as labour and material costs shot up. Interest rates are up now, and demand is still sky high.

If people will pay it then builders will charge it.

I had my name down on the waiting list for a 5 bed at the Woodbrook development between Shankill and Bray. The 5 beds sold out quick in the earlier phases when they went on sale, I believe priced at 830-850. Months later and they're still trying to shift all of the 3/4 beds from the current phase. Well, got a call earlier to see if I'd be interested in putting a deposit down on one from the final phase before they go on the market... at 950-965. I was expecting a price increase but that seems absolutely mental to me. They won't be ready until the end of the year too.