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

I'm not messing, I genuinely wanted to know which source of numbers you were referring to. There are multiple, and often they are contradictory. The contradictions are probably because they're all based on assumptions, and I guess I just wondered which assumptions had caught your eye.

I disagree that the figures are widely accepted. It seems to me a large part of the problem is that nobody can agree on what the figures are.

We'll agree to disagree so.

I think we can both agree nobody is interested in them. That is abundantly clear. But cannot comment further on that here.

In case anybody else is interested in seeing the figures on which there is such agreement, here is table 2.2 from the Housing Commission:

This includes an assumed deficit as of April 2022 of somewhere between 212,500 and 256,000 houses.

I don't know how much the assumed deficit has grown by since 2022, if indeed it has. Yes of course you could calculate it if you knew both the increase in housing stock and the increase in population.

But we don't need to worry, no doubt the government etc are aware of these figures and can do the calculations.

There's no doubt my post covid low immigration prediction was way off the mark. It was about as accurate as your post covid predictions on inflation and interest rates.

Hindsight shows us that immigration led to one of the highest incidents of population growth every recorded of any country in history. Fair play to you if you saw that coming.

Of course the population growth will be very helpful in mitigating any risk of oversupply. That's a given.

The price/cost won't be a problem as everybody will have a load of extra cash because from those projections it looks like most people won't be having any children.

If the majority of the population are single or childless couples there will be plenty more money sloshing around to spend on houses!

Good point, not sure how it would work in practice.

I was sort of assuming that if we have a population of 7m, with proportionally less children, then presumably the children will be replaced by proportionally more adult tax payers.

The thinking is that we will converge with the Euro average, and they seem to get along swimmingly with this arrangement, so perhaps the change in demographics means our tax rate will converge with the euro average as well, might even see our taxes go down! Hurrah!

Correct, not always the case - about 15% of children live in a single parent household.

But if our fertility remains the same the majority of couples who have children will continue to have at least two or more children.

So even if the parents live apart the same fertility rate will struggle to generate more 1 or 2 person households than 3 person households.

The only way to converge with European averages of household size is to also move closer to European average fertility rates.

Unless you know of another way?

I don't know to be honest, but probably non working families have more children I'd guess.

The projections are based on everybody having fewer children, so yes definitely you'd expect working families to have fewer children.

But in order to have a majority of 1 and 2 person households it seems likely the majority of couples will have to go from having 2 children to having no children.

Assuming the majority of parents continue to stay together, a one child family is a three person household. You obviously cannot have 0.2 of a child.

Oddly, to calculate the deficit they used average household size of 2.4, not the actual household size.

A positive was they recommended that future building prioritised 1 and 2 person units rather than 3 bed

Obviously they weren't trying to calculate demand as in market demand, people trying to find a place to buy etc, they were specifically trying to calculate the deficit in the housing stock required to accommodate housing need for the population as at April 2022.

They stress this repeatedly eg:

Base housing policy on an assessment of the housing required for a well-functioning society.
This should not be conflated with market demand or construction sector capacity.

So they have ignored how many houses are required based on the actual average household size of 2.74, and instead calculated how many houses are required for an assumed preferred household size of 2.4.

The assumption obviously is that an average of household size of 2.74 does not make for a well-functioning society.

You're correct that much of the assumption rests on the fact that there are elevated numbers of adults living with their parents, but given our demographics, it would also appear to suggest that in this presumed well functioning society of 2.4 AHS, that a large proportion of those people with 2 or more children under 18 would prefer to have had less children, or that they would prefer not to live with them.

That seems a stretch to me.