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

I am not, but whatever.

Good luck with your SF vote.

Yes, I am of the view that it is overwhelmingly a problem of chronic housing shortage and not currently a speculative bubble such as in the years leading up to 2006/2007.

We are in an election every potential vested interest ate laying out there stall.

There are plenty of policies that are easy to implement, near instant, and that have been proven to work in other countries, that are being completely ignored here.

Increase the taxes hugely on vacant land zoned for housing to prevent land hoarding

Increase property taxes on vacant properties significantly

Increase the stamp duty massively on foreign buyers of Irish property

We could copy Denmark's policy changes on asylum seekers and reduce arrivals by 90% overnight (as happened there), reducing the number of arrivals to Ireland who need to be housed by over 2000 humans a month - thats the equivalent of building approx 10,000 additional new houses a year. Independent Ireland are at least calling for that and may possibly be a junior part of an FF/FG government instead of the Greens if they get enough seats.

etc

Thats also not even touching on the longer term stuff like dramatically increasing the production of social and affordable housing, to remove the 60,000 households on HAP from the private sector market, which our opposition parties are at least in favour of.

There are lots of policies levers that FG and FF are just refusing to pull, because their goal very clearly at this stage is further increases in house prices.

None of these issues are new

A government flush with cash and spending 8 billion per year on housing mainly on the demand side should be at the top of there game in ensuring there responsibilities in supply generation are adequately met.

This particular developer offered to do the water connection works themselves but the system is inflexible to allow this

Electricity and water connections cause significant delays in building. Delays are a huge cost for a project. Is it poisible that these delays are swallowing up all the subsidies to buyers in higher housing costs

Planning has been one of the greatest scourges on the nation for most posters lifetimes and the recent ammendments to the planning act is 800 pages long. This surely adds significant cost to housing and significantly more in the soft costs of housing provision

The stats tell us we are the best in europe. Improvement still needed, of course.

Agreed, but SF would skew this even further. Rent freezes and the like, all proposed by SF; they will push landlords out of the market and make the problem even worse.

Yep & pushing the homes into the sales market is good for buyers, but does little to populate the rental market with properties, which means rental prices continue to rise, against the backdrop of a growing population with an increased spending power.

The most impactful factor in the housing game is supply and FFG will deliver the most homes over the next 5yr term; that's the reason they are still the best option we have, if we want to alleviate the housing crisis.

If we can coincide the projected increase in housing supply under current govt policy, with a decrease in immigration that is not employment linked, we will see improvements in the housing market, slowly but surely.

Let's hope the European champions don't rest on there laurels as by this data dump, it would take 20 years for ireland to reach Europe's average level of stock per person based on building 50k units per year, 18 years for urban areas (all)

What you say is true in principle, but doesn't account for the 100k annual population increase.

The number of rental properties needed 2 years ago is lower than the number we need today. The number of rental properties we will need this time next year is higher than the number we need today.

If rental stock doesnt increase, irrespective of what happens in the sales market, rent prices will continue to rise, as demand outstrips supply in the rental sector.

I agree with you that vacant properties should be taxed and not left idle. I said as much. I would much rather see an ex-rental property that is now lay as an idle asset, forced into the sales market thtough punitive vacancy taxation.

However, my central point is that supply of both rental & sales properties still has to increase, especially when the population is so rapidly increasing; regardless of how we configure out existing housing stock.

in all fairness the civil servants don’t just do as they are told to follow policy. They even have roles to lobby a new government on decisions and dictate a lot. Furthermore they know that no matter what the outcome is they will still have there job despite the fact that if they were in the private sector they would be given marching orders for bad decision making. There are 100’s of examples out there including the famous bike shead. Issue is that nobody is accountable and despite who gets in power that is highly unlikely to change

It's already been said and everyone already knows this but who cares? The majority of folk are property owners who are happy enough about these measures and will vote back in the exact same shower. There's no credible alternative for those directly affected as SF would possibly be even more inflationary.

And i agree with you the vacancy rate should be tackled, I have said that constantly.

However, it wont stop rents rising if the population keeps growing as it is and new home completions dont rise significantly.