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

I for one can't wait until we suffer similar social issues as USA and Canada due to lack of affordable housing.

All those homeless people really add a lot of culture to the cities

Yet the most unproductive sector in the economy (construction) are able to increase margins by up to 20% in the last 12 months

Plenty of countries who are far better. We don't need to follow the countries which are far worse.

We should strive to follow the countries who do better at housing and other areas like health and infrastructure.

Are they the most unproductiveor do too many want everything handed to them. Specifications for build quality and certification is getting crazy in this country.

The concrete for foundations and floors is species at 35N, in the UK its a 5-1 mix which is 18N. Engineering look for certs fir everything abd try to certify nothing g themselves. On self builds you have to get a certificate for the radon barrier,which means using a specialist fitter, it's a minimum of 1K over .material costs. Tgey can do the barrier membrane in less than an hour in a 2k sqft house.

Engineers no longer want to mark out house on site and do not allow blocklayers lay out house. They want the GPS outfits to do it. It costs about 1.5k.

The amount of steel used in houses in this country is crazy. Engineers are over specifying all the time.

A slum lord could well buy that.

Hardly worth 700k plus in Tallaght!

Debatably Tallaght or not either way its on the wrong side of the M50 well out West, its not exactly prime Dublin real estate.

Certainly not worth requiring the guts of a million (700k asking + at least 200k rebuild) to turn into a livable house I'd think.

With Minister Chambers not going ahead with improving the tax situation for investing in things like stocks/shares and savings accounts in the upcoming Budget, it seems to be full steam ahead for continued increases in house prices due to no other types of investment being attractive in this country.

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/financial-services/2024/09/19/government-plan-to-spur-households-to-invest-misses-budget-deadline/

The Central Bank has just stated that we are only on course for 32,000 completions this year, not the 40,000 that Simon Harris is on about.

They reckon it will be 2026 before we get near that figure.

Disastrous.

Housing crisis across Europe and Ireland is one of few with growth in residential construction. It is far from a disaster. There is significant increase in supply occurring and things will improve. You cannot create more plumbers, builders, electricians, carpenters in short space of time and need to avoid over supply that in part led to bust in 2008. We are in much better state than a lot of countries looking forward.

Our population is increasing by 100,000 a year. We'd need approx 40,000 new housing units a year just to house this population increase. We're building approx 35,000.

Nevermind replacing older housing units (estimated at 5-10,000 units a year), or helping to reduce the severity of one of the worst housing crises in the developed world (a deficit of approx 200-250,000 estimated already).

And to top it off the housing objectives, and projections, for the next 5 years come nowhere close to the 60k housing units a year we'd need to be hitting. Our completions rate is increasing by about 3,000 units a year, which might sound good in abstract but it means it will take us almost a decade from today to hit an appropriate level.

How is that combination not a disaster? The situation is already terrible, and statistically only getting worse every year, and theres absolutely no sign of it improving in the next 5 years based on current projections. Thats a disaster by any objective measure.

It's not an unsolvable disaster but it is definitely a disaster.

Its extremely unlikely that the immigrants coming to our country have household units anywhere near as large as native Irish, given the vast majority are single adults - not family units. 2.5 is regarded as a conservatively high household unit size estimation for them. In reality its likely under 2.0, which would require substantially more than the above conservative figure of 40k housing units required.

And the statistical nit picking doesn't change my overall point whatsoever - even with your 2.85 figure our out of control immigration and population growth by itself eats every single house completed. Nevermind making any dent in the housing crisis, or replacing a single existing housing unit.

The situation isn't an unsolvable disaster by any means, note I never said that. My point was the situation is currently an unmitigated disaster, and is going to remain so, based on past, current and stated future government policy.

If we had a government aiming to complete 60k housing units a year, and taking measures to achieve this ASAP the crisis would be far more solvable. And ideally who had aimed for this years ago. But we didn't, and we don't.

Or if the supply side was being ignored if we had a government aiming to follow Denmark's example and reduce our number of asylum seekers by approx 90%/25k arrivals a year, the demand side would at least be helped. But we don't have that either.

So at present, and for the forseeable future, even ignoring the many other factors in our housing crisis the population growth vs housing units built data all by itself very clearly shows the housing crisis is only going to get worse.

What about all of the people in their 20s (and older) living with their parents?

What about all the older single people and couples who would love to rent or own their own place but cannot?

Is it ideal that people live in their parents home later and later in life with no independence, and that people in their 30s live in cramped single rooms in shared houses with a load of randomers?

I think it's blatantly obvious that a huge amount of people in Ireland now fall in to those groups, and their lives would be much fuller if the housing market was in a place that allowed them to not be in that situation anymore.

It is stupid to look at average household size alone and conclude from that we have no issues.

AHS alone does not tell any story about deficit or surplus of available stock. Prices do though, supply and demand do, and population versus housing for sale and housing for rent also tell that story far better than the AHS metric.

I am not aware of anyone else in this country who claims our housing deficit is not that bad. Do you believe that all the various experts, analysts and policy advisory groups are all wrong in their estimates of housing deficit?