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

Sure it's bad news for individual tenants if they're evicted to facilitate a sale, but it is not necessarily bad news for the rental supply as a whole.

Buyers and renters don't exist in entirely different ecosystems. Most of the ex-rentals will be bought by FTBers who are vacating a rental, or by landlords who retain the property as a rental. Rental supply will stay broadly similiar.

How can any of this be true? Rental properties being bought by FTBs will decrease the rental stock, you're surely not arguing otherwise?

If we had a lot of things, it would be different. However, when we have a "society" replete with hyper individuals, we get what we have now. You are correct that it will never be fixed under FF/FG, but it would not be fixed under SF, Labour or any other party currently in place. The housing crisis is a symptom of a systemic problem that affects every western country. Voting in another collection of bought and sold suits will not change that.

How would we define too many people living here? Could it not equally be the case that there just arent enough homes?

I wouldnt have thought the population density of ireland is very high at all, even by european standards.

Agree 2.5k is a lot to be paying each month. However,it would be interesting to see how much HAP is underpinning Dublin rents. Very often it is folks working in lower paid jobs who are in receipt of support. This in turn IMHO contributes towards setting a rental floor.

Without government intervention, house prices would fall quite a lot and I think there are too many people that would be unhappy with this occurring given it would impact their own wealth accumulation. Therefore, in order to see less government intervention voters would need to vote for parties that do not want house prices to keep climbing. Essentially, homeowners want and need government intervention whereas non-homeowners should want less government intervention.

The big swindle has been to convince people that government intervention leads to more supply and lower prices when the opposite is the case. Ireland has big problems with its bloated quote unquote Government and State encroachment in people’s lives more generally but particularly in the property market which is not a properly functioning and fair market.

What are you suggesting the govt do though? Relax planning laws so we can get to 70k new homes per year, rather than 40k?

There have been many many posts in this very thread already discussing numerous measures the government could enact to lower prices immediately, in the medium term, and in the long term.

Cut all of the waste of tax payers money demand side subsidies instantly, refuse new planning for commercial developments to route all current construction capacity into residential developments, and train/hire large numbers of people to staff a large state development agency that directly builds housing being respectively three of the most obvious/well accepted.

But all would lead to a decrease in home prices, so won't happen under the current government.

A 30% drop in home prices would never result in a 30% pay cut for tradesmen. Labour makes up only a fraction of the cost of building a new house, and is one of the least elastic elements.

This is from the SCSI which is if anything over-generous:

When we're at essentially 100% construction employment currently, with the government desperate to hire any and all workers it can get, and with tens of billions of euros to spare, "if the prices dropped no houses would be built" is also blatently untrue.

If prices dropped significantly, to the point where private development dropped significantly, any spare construction capacity would be instantly snapped up by the state to build badly needed social and affordable housing. We wouldn't see any dropoff in actual housing completions.

I'd fully agree a 30% drop is extremely unlikely, but do note I never said it was. I just posted an article that shows the majority of Irish people are in favour of a drop of that magnitude. A 10-20% drop would be far more achievable/likely given reasonable policies.

That aside, the Irish state with its current massive surplus of funds, and almost equal massive deficit of social and affordable housing (we'd need about 50,000 new units tomorrow just to clear the current HAP list - nevermind anything else), would have absolutely no problem instantly hiring and putting to use any and all spare capacity in the Irish construction industry as it became available.

Nevermind the countless much needed national infrastucture projects currently on hold due to an inability to get workers to build them on top, which would be an additional rather relevant (and worthy) use of any spare capacity.

The idea that house prices can never drop a cent because it would cause all private developers to stop developing new projects, and that this would then cause all housing construction in the state to grind to a halt, is quite obviously completely insane when you look at the real world figures. Its a propaganda line exclusively pushed by developers, and politicians in their pocket, who want ever rising prices and ever increasing profit margins.

If average Irish home prices dropped by 10-20% tomorrow it would be nothing but positive for the state, which is why a large majority of Irish voters, including homeowners, want it (or an even larger drop) to happen.

This has been touted every few months for years. It won't happy any time soon.

Im sorry to say that things will continue unless there is some external event that forces change.

If a global pandemic and cost of living crisis can't even slow down house prices then I don't know what will.