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

About 20% of rental households in the country are now on HAP, and more is spent on other housing supports on top. Total housing supports in the private sector rental market are nearing in on €1bn a year cost to taxpayers.

Its an utter waste of money - the vast majority of the 60,000 households on HAP, at the very least, should be in social housing.

Whatever about ideological opposition to building social housing, at this stage theres absolutely no financial logic to it. HAP, long term leasing of properties etc, are just horrible value for money for Irish tax payers.

In 2024

The "construction industry" had much higher prices, margins, grants, waivers from service fees, grants to build apartments in excess of 100k, higher customer mortgages, wages, savings

Yet output fell from the previous year

Population, please realise when your being played for idiots

On the balance of probability, who do you think voted for the FFG State

The Landlord or the tenant

As said before nobody wants fair laws regarding tenancies more than the 95% compliant tenants.

Why?

They don't want to be living next door to troublesome tenants

They don't want to paying a premium for non paying tenants

These are the 2 of the 3 main issues affecting landlords, they affect compliant tenants greater in my opinion

The issue is supply pure and simple. The parties on the left wanted to freeze rents completely and have an eviction ban. Why exactly do you think the RPZ legislation is being reviewed? Even Ronan Lyons (a renowned voice in the sector) who has no "skin in the game" has said the RPZ is not working.

People are not paying a premium for non paying tenants as its the landlord who is "paying" by not receiving any rent. Even if non paying tenants were evicted with the lack of supply there are plenty of willing paying tenants willing to take their place.

Evictions and making hard decisions when it comes to housing people is political suicide hence the reason politicians and the media are happy to blame the "evil landlord" remember the ordinary "joe soap".

The angle that I look at it.

HAP allows those that can't afford rent to rent a home, subsidised by the state. This increases the number of potential people a landlord can rent to and puts upward pressure on pricing.

So your rent will inevitably go up because I'm living beside you on the HAP scheme and it's your tax money that is paying for me to be on the scheme. So in effect you are paying your taxes to keep your own rent high and climbing

Everybody, except maybe landlords, would be better off if the state used the money to build social homes

The State has forced the private sector to deal with a social issue and this is starting to backfire on them. The build quality of traditional social housing was equal to if not better than that of the private sector in the past.

This being said why has the State left the housing of those who need to be housed to the private sector. If we look at the part V requirements in the planning process. Again the State wanted to integrate social housing amongst private housing. Why? All buildings have to be built to the same min standards irrespective of State or Privately owned.

You build State housing and your issue is significantly reduced on rents. People need to dig deeper (pardon the pun) into exactly what is happening. The State is happy to blame the landlords and that approach has not worked, they realise they need private investment to meet targets.

Its easy for those in opposition to say freeze rents, ban evictions etc but when it comes to actually solving the issue its much more difficult.

Can you truly see a politician endorsing an eviction of a family from a social property/private property for non payment of rent? All of the recent legislation has been pro tenant whether you accept that or not. Indefinite leases after 6 months, RTB that has no real power, lengthy RTB process, lengthy eviction process, almost impossible to evict tenants from social housing for anti social behaviour/non payment of rent. Rent caps in the RPZ, landlord responsible for the anti social behaviour of their tenants and having to go through the RTB process to address the issue.

If you can highlight equal benefits introduced for the landlords in the same timeframe I would be interested in hearing same.

The intention with Rpz and HAP was that they were to be temporary measures while stock was increased. The abysmal failure has been the over reliance on the private sector which has made the problem worse. A state run by FFG is incapable and conflicted in resolving this issue. The grassroots are property people

The process of pricing in any business needs to take risk into account. In my time renting I have negotiated significant discounts through furnishing references and documented consistent on time rent payment.

Ideally for social/subsidised housing a condition of acceptance should be that rent is deducted from salary/welfare payments. If a housing emergency needs to be declared to achieve this, then do it. Social housing limits raised to at a minimum average salary with rent calculated as percentage of household take home pay. Reductions for people willing to house share

Taxpayers money should be focused on supply of new homes not pumping land, housing, rent and developers share price

This exactly, there's a 40 year + job at hand here to procure housing. A semi-state should be setup to accomplish these goals, there's no reason to leave it to the inefficient private developers.

Apparently james browne (the housing minister, not the singer) has a plan that will remove RPZ's and protect renters. I'd love to know what this plan is

https://www.thejournal.ie/stop-screwing-it-up-mary-lou-mcdonald-tells-6710606-May2025/?utm_source=thejournal&utm_content=top-stories

Perhaps a subsidy in the form of a tax cut for any landlord that keeps their rental charges below a certain level, would only be a short term solution of course, they'd also need to build more homes

Why do we need to focus on bringing in private investment? Thats the strategy thats been tried for the last decade and clearly isn't working at all. Despite all the tax payer funded freebies being thrown at it.

We have a state with huge amounts of idle capital at hand, and a massive need for social housing to be built.

Any slack in the construction industry from private investment slowing can be very easily taken up by the government building social housing.

Get those 60,000 households off of HAP and save the tax payers tens of billions of euros long term.

The long term expenses of paying HAP, and signing long term leases, for social housing are far higher.

"The Government has agreed 9,000 social housing leasing deals with property funds that will cost €3.24 billion, last for 25 years and the funds will own the properties at the end of the lease, the Dáil has heard.

Houses costing €3,200 a month would cost €900,000 by the end of the lease, and ownership of the house would go back to the property fund."

And HAP and other rental supports are similar - approaching €1bn a year now in costs, and increasing rapidly, with no assets ever owned by the state.

Its an utter waste of tax payers money - building social housing is the long term, cheaper, solution.

Selling them to the occupants is an entirely different (and also bad policy), issue, that shouldn't be happening either.

All you are doing is stating how much it is costing this way but you don't have a comparison. So how much are you saying it would cost if the government built them and then administer them? You have to remember that any state employees gets a host of benefits and long running costs such as pensions as do the properties.

They actually do a cost benefit appraisals on such things. If the likes of the SIPTU got rid of the direct hire of cleaners and hired a private company instead to save money even though their cleaning bill went up you know the government aren't doing something crazy.

Now what you are saying makes sense but not when it comes to accounting and they calculate out running cost, liability, insurance, admin etc… While you say they should do away with tenant purchases that would be extremely unpopular and would effect many people that lived in properties a long time. Often what happens later in life the children give the money to a parent to buy.

You also have to note the councils own the most vacant property which in general is property they didn't maintain and can't get it together to fix them up. Look up the flats in Coolock to see an example, this has been a problem for decades with these properties. Those assets you think the council own are classed as liabilities. Coolock shows what the liabilities are. I have seen the flats on Sean McDermot street completely refurbished multiple times over the decades.

I worked in a place and they had a manual job to do which cost 2k a month to run I put together a proposal to automate it which would have cost 20k or 10 months of running costs. It was turned down because they didn't have the money in the improvement budget. They kept it the manual way for 6 years and they removed it because they process was no longer needed as they got the information a different way which just happened to have this side effect.

Things are a lot more complicated than people think if they never worked within such large organizations.

The main argument that has been used in recent years against the state ramping up its home building programme is that there is a lack of capacity in the construction market - that we simply can't get the builders. Which is somewhat valid.

Realistically the state has the financial capability right now to build tens of thousands of units of social housing per year, if the industry capacity was not being used by the private sector

The capital for the construction costs is available, the demand from people on HAP and similar is there, and the long term financial incentive for tax payers is there (get people off of HAP and similar rental supports, stop the state buying private sector homes for social housing, stop the state leasing private sector homes for social housing).

We absolutely need private sector investment longer term, but for the next few years at least the solution here is the government picking up any and all slack in the industry as it appears. Not throwing more tax payer euros at private developers to incentivize them, when we now have a decade of such schemes already being shown not to work.

So a collection of landlords belive HAP is the bees knees when compared to a dysfunctional FFG housing policy, where many of there party members are, you guessed it, landord/lady's feeding off the multiple taxpayer payments as well as being lobbyists for banking, developers and investment funds

Landlords will rightfully complain about the high tax they pay (despite the loopholes) but seem oblivious to the fact; a completely dysfuntional housing policy requires high taxes.

This system must continue because clearly, there is no better way and FFG are experts in Housing policy.

Historically We have had multiple tribunals and investigations, mishaps where lessons have been learned etc it would be a shame to throw away all that knowledge now

Edit: HAP and investment funds have a place in housing, our error is that they are far too dominant