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

There is merit to this idea. I don't know whether Noonan intended prices to go to the moon, but I doubt that he really cares. He has his pension, and I'm sure he's cleaned up on investments on the side.

This brings up something to consider. We here often discuss the housing situation as if it's a disaster. It objectively is, but let us not fall into the mistake of believing that this is universally recognised. A sizable proportion of people here are doing very, very well from the situation, and a lot of people who are secure and comfortable. I see a lot of 242 cars around, expensive housing renovations and packed shops.

When one is not affected by a problem, it is not a problem. Humans don't really think too far beyond their own needs. Unfortunately for Ireland, the people making the decisions are almost exclusively those who are benefiting from things as they are. Turkeys don't vote for Christmas.

in both cases the family moved in, they werent purchased to rent.

This was true in the noughties and it did not prevent a collapse. If you think FFG policies are good for you, your in for Mike Tyson slap later

not in south dublin which is where i am.

Indeed. About 70% of adults own their own homes in Ireland.

I dont think the majority of them want to see house prices fall.

Dublin having expensive house prices is in line with other large employment centres across Ireland, the UK and the US, as well as other parts of Europe.

The govt will move towards 50k new homes from next year onwards.

They are making changes to the planning process and hiring hundreds more staff to speed it up, as well as making judicial reviews much harder to invoke.

So there is progress and I dont believe SF would match the numbers thar FFG will deliver over the next 5 years anyway.

We are building more houses per capita than any country in Europe AND we are growing our housing output faster than any other country. That is incredible.

It was always going to be an uphill fight following the lost decade of construction from 2007 - 2017, followed by COVID, followed by a series of global conflicts and a rapid increase in migration to Europe.

But the hard construction numbers show the last few years have been a remarkable success story and the outlook for the next few years is excellent too.

I don’t disagree but any time you are behind the curve on something, proper performance management is to have key indicators and see them move in the right direction.

In Ireland our key statistic is undoubtedly number of houses built per annum. We are doing phenomenally well on a global scale here.

To throw it all in the bin because a very long term problem which was created between 2009-2016 is not ‘fixed’ would be silly. It would be like a relegation football team who move to mid table sacking the manager because they didn’t win the league immediately. Progress is progress.

On prices. We have effectively 0 unemployment, the highest wage inflation in many decades along with what looks like a rapidly falling interest rate environment. The potential for house prices to fall in such a scenario is practically 0. It just has never happened anywhere ever and likely never will.

Comparing the price of an asset in nominal terms to 20 years ago is silly for obvious reasons. Spoiler: in 2045, house prices are going to be a hell of a lot higher than they are now.

I’ve chatted with so many people about this article. It’s without a doubt, and by a country mile, the worst journalistic piece I have ever read.

I would have initially assumed the writer (and editor?) is just an utter moron, but I don’t think any journalist could actually be that stupid. So it must have a dodgy underlying political motive which is shocking in a ‘fact check’ article. You’d hope 99% of the population would be able to see through it for the drivel it is, but the replies on the writers feed would suggest it hooked in a few at least.

Such a shame to deliberately mislead people on arguably THE most important topic in the country. If it was the Irish Times or anything more serious than ‘The Journal’ I’d have gone through the process of making a formal complaint.

‘Addicted to doommongering’ - so so true.

His claim was based on figures by a group called Euroconstruct, which compared Ireland’s projected level of housing construction this year and in 2025 with 18 other countries

Both of you should know better than relying on projected figures for housing construction. The projected cost of the children's hospital was circa 600m

Those projected figures were highly distorted by the rush to get commencement notices in before a deadline to qualify for a waiver on development fees and water connection charges. (Could someone be playing politics massaging the figures) This of course increases the book value of the unbuilt sites.

The actual housing completion figures for 2024 have been abysmal

Quarter 1 was down over 12% on the corresponding 2023 quarter

Quarter 2 was down 5% on the corresponding 2023 quarter

Its worth remembering that qtr1 and 2 output for 2023 was considered very poor, yet the narrative has changed with intelligent data driven posters describing government performance as amazing

Its all about the narrative and FFG skill in conning the electorate

According to the Central Statistics Office (CSO), there were 6,884 new dwelling completions between April and June this year, a fall of 5.4 per cent on the same period last year. It meant the half-year total of 12,730 completions was down 8.6 per cent on the corresponding period last Year

O’Brien said in May that the commencement figures “are truly record breaking”, but they are not really a measure of whether construction on a home is started.The state isn’t tracking when the first bricks on a new home are laid, it’s tracking what developers say they intend to do........

The spike was “very likely” due to developers lodging commencement notices ahead of an April 24 deadline to avail of a development levy waiver and water connection charge rebate.

Was Europe suppressing supply for a decade prior to 2023

Would it have been better to have been building consistently close to demand over the prior decade (or at least the prior 7 years while corpo taxes were rising) while labour, materials and finance were considerably cheaper

33k is nowhere near enough to cover indegenious demand, nevermind the migration

How come we could build 50k in 2000 with much lower population and less people working in construction. What are the barriers to efficiency and who put them there

I think this notion of houses being too cheap/expensive to build is a little simplistic.

In any process, you can consider what price you can achieve for the final product, you can look at what it will take to create that final product and then you look at the inputs. Some of the inputs are completely beyond your control, whereas some of them are based simply on who is willing to pay the most for them. A field at the edge of a village that might have made 50k now makes 3m because that is what developers bid each other up to.

This thing about inability to make profit on housing will not wash for me while developers are bidding the prices of sites and land up constantly higher and higher.