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

Given FFGs past history of completely ignoring the housing crunch, turning it into a crisis, and later an emergency. I think any political party that isn't a subsidiary of FFG will be able to deliver more new homes than FFG. But we are stuck with FFG and their gene pool indies until I presume 2029 so it's probably not worth worrying about for a while

https://www.thejournal.ie/e2-5m-spent-on-cork-housing-estate-that-is-being-partially-demolished-6782996-Aug2025/?utm_source=thejournal&utm_content=top-stories

€2.5m on zero houses, it can't be difficult to beat that record

There are still 30k + homes being delivered each year. We need more than that of course but 30k is not nothing.

Quoting a single wasteful council led project in Cork doesnt change the fact that over 30 thousand homes are built every 12 months across the country, which is enough to accommodate the population of Galway city!

We have the highest construction rate per capita of the 19 euroconstruct countries. We are outbuilding the vast majority of other countries in europe.

Most building is funded by private investment, which SF wanted to move away from. I dont see how SF would be able to outbuild FFG with that strategy and it is very probable that we would have seen lower numbers of new homes being constructed since the election, had there been a change in govt.

And if you were the housing minister and thought about it longer, you would know that there was no construction resource or funds available to build publicly in high volumes, so unless you rely on the private sector, you are building almost nothing and your 30k new homes a year would be in no way attainable.

Even SFs housing plan relied on most units being delivered by the private sector.

I do agree that we need to reinvest in public house building, but to do that will take a long time & where would we even get the workforce from?

We still need the private sector to deliver private housing, regardless of what happens with public building.

Not everyone qualifies for a social home and people need to be able to buy on the open market if we are to sustain a good jobs market here.

The fact remains that for the forseeable future, the vast majority of housing stock is going to be delivered by the private sector. If you dont incentivise the private sector, you dont get new homes.

The fact remains that for the forseeable future, the vast majority of housing stock is going to be delivered by the private sector. If you dont incentivise the private sector, you dont get new homes

The more you incentivise, the higher you drive the price, making it more difficult to resolve the issue. As you drive the price higher it eventually collapses everything and we repeat 08 again.

The development fee waiver below achieves just one purpose: increase the value of development land.

It Potentially pushes development away from serviced sites to unserviced sites. This pressures the gov to provide such services to solidify the land price appreciation for the developer

The best way to incentivise the private sector is to get out of the way. Private incomes are at there highest levels ever, materials and energy have fallen significantly from war time highs. Developers margins have increased substantially on prices up 20% plus in 2 years

Does that sound like a sector that needs taxpayer subsidies?

Removing the fee from the developer makes the cost of construction cheaper. This will incentivise more house building and so is a good use of tax payer subsidies.

When developers thought the fee would be reintroduced, the number of planned new developments went down, as the cost of construction went up.

Anything the govt can do to minimise the cost of construction and therefore increase housing output is a good thing.

How else would we increase housing output in the private sector?

I agree with all of your points.

Essential workers should be prioritised for cost rental/affordable homes, but we need to bring those homes onstream in the first place, before we can assign them to essential workers or anybody else.

Incentivise private development and ramp up public delivery of public homes, so that the total housing output increases past 50k new homes per year.

Then apply the schemes to help the squeezed middle and prioritise essential workers and those earning median or average incomes.

People working in hospitals or schools and so on in the city should get priority for social/affordable homes in the city.

SF wanted the investment funds out, even though the investment funds were the ones delivering all the homes.

There was no way SF could deliver those numbers without the support of the investment funds.

FFG are not perfect, but they were the least worse option when it came to home building.

The situation we are in now could have been a lot worse, under a different govt.

Investment funds are not delivering most homes. The housing crisis is not bottlenecked by a lack of finance or investors - listen to the actual builders and developers.

The housing supply bottleneck is a lack of infrastructure (water, sewage, power) and the judicial system holding up planning permissions for years. This is from the horses mouth.

They are both issues that lay at govts feet, and can be rectified with legislative changes and increased investment in public infrastructure (sounds a bit socialist doesnt it?).

No amount of private investors can fix this bottleneck

Who is delivering most new homes, if it isnt the private investors?

I do agree the govt should be doing more to incentivise small landlords into the market, but the govt policies are still less punitive than those put forward by the opposition, some of which included multi year rent freezes and eviction bans.

Those policies would drive out small landlords much quicker than the current FFG regulations.

The thinking there would be to help a lot of the less well off in our society. If you freeze rent increases and build more housing you can then undo the rent freeze

A bit like what FFG have implemented with their cap on rental increases except it would be at 0%. The difference being that FFG haven't bothered with the house building side of the plan

Protecting the renters is a good thing, but thats not what we are discussing here. We are talking about how to increase the number of new homes being built.

Freezing rents will reduce the number of new homes being built, so you cant freeze rents and expect the private market to build more homes. You need to pick one or the other.

Your last point I dont agree with. By not capping the rents at 0%, the investment funds have continued to fund building in Ireland. This is down to FFG policy.

The funds are not financing builds at the rates that they would do if the rent cap was removed altogether but they are building more than if the rent increase was capped at 0%.

Rent increases capped at 0% means very few new homes get built by private funds, rents with no cap at all means we maximise the number of homes getting built.

What FFG have done is taken the middle ground and introduced a cap to protect renters, but still allowing for an increase in investment yield.

SF would have capped the rent rises at 0%, which would have brought new privately funded home construction to a near stand still.

very little difference between a rent freeze and allowing a landlord increase rent by tiny amounts.

I did the numbers recently for someone where the house is well below market rates and they were allowed increase by only €4 in that year.