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

Upper end of the market may be slowing, but the lower end has now become the new lower upper end with some crazy prices being paid.

Capture of the political system through lobbying is not fraud, however it was identified as a major contributing factor to the last crash.

Developers, Landowner and investment fund lobbyists are all from the FFG gene pool

What the government could do to reduce build cost is to depress land prices by using legislation.

Changing the way land value is taxed after rezoning would make most impact.

But to be clear, this is a deflection from the point.

The “we aren’t building anything” brigade are gaslighting people, it’s just wrong.

And the approach by this brigade is more deflection once their lies are called out.

What I prefer to look at (rather than this endless doom loop) is where we actually are.

33-35k as we are at is not an awful place to be. The 41k “need” was not pulled out of their asses (neither was the 33k btw).

Comparing to past decades-

1. The quality isn’t comparable
2. The locations aren’t comparable
3. The use cases aren’t comparable (over half the homes in the West were built as holiday homes once upon a time)

We also have to look at stuff like retrofitting and the impact on supply. This is a key input to any model assumption. Putting some of our spare building capacity into helps, as does even the vacant home grants.

Where we are positives;

1. We have a under occupied housing stock, we have more than enough 3 beds
2. We are building a good amount of public houses per year
3. We’ve tackled some of the hold ups in planning through the new Act (still being implemented)
4. We’ve tackled some of the regulatory stupidity - standards, RPZ etc
5. FTB scheme has been a huge success and is a path to he ownership
6. We now have the majority of transport infrastructure through planning that will enable ToD in Dublin (at least)

Negatives

1. We bottled it on Co-Living
2. We’ve driven out foreign investment
3. Cork remains behind on Luas and Bus Connects, not withstanding progress on the CACR
4. Water and electricity is behind where it needs to be from a planning perspective
5. Our costs are still too high and we are wasting investment
6. The NPF remains far too prescriptive and isn’t flexible enough. Whilst we are building better homes in better areas, there isn’t enough in Dublin City centre

"Housing target should be revised up to 60,000 homes per year, Dublin Chamber says"

"Construction Industry Federation and its member body Irish Home Builders’ Association call for 60,000 housing units per annum"

"Today, the government has approved revised housing targets for the period 2025 to 2030, aiming to deliver a total of 303,000 new homes across Ireland. This ambitious plan sets an average of over 50,000 homes per year"

We need 60k homes a year, and the government's own lowest possible plans are for 50k+ homes a year.

In the private sector in any job if you hit 50-60% of your yearly targets you'd be fired very quickly for incompetence.

"33-35k" is very clearly utter failure, and we haven't even hit that last year or likely this year.

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2025/07/03/housing-target-should-be-revised-up-to-60000-homes-per-year-dublin-chamber-says/

https://cif.ie/2024/09/13/construction-industry-federation-and-irish-home-builders-association-call-for-60000-housing-units-per-annum-and-an-increase-in-residential-land-zoning-by-local-authorities/

https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-housing-local-government-and-heritage/press-releases/government-agrees-to-progress-amendments-to-draft-revision-of-national-planning-framework-ambitious-new-housing-targets/

Are you incapable of answering a question or just continuing to deflect when you struggle?

Me calling out your lies on our housing output change over the last few years is not me saying it’s enough, again please just quit the misrepresentation and outright lies here.

Tell me why you said “we need” 60,000 houses a year and why you like that particular number. Why not the 93,000 from Davy?

We built circa similar numbers in the late 80s early 90s in what were difficult times with significant outward migration and half the population

In 1985 we had 1.03 million in employment rising to 1.23 million in 1995. In 2025, we have 2,818,100 in employment

Based on these figures alone, would you think it would be prudent to be building double the current output.

But again;

Where were these homes built?

What was the quality (size, energy rating etc)?

What services were provided?

What was the purpose of these homes (primary residence, holiday home)?

Bungalows and detached houses were over half of the housing stock built in 1981, for example. Single dwellings amounted to just 18% in 2024 per the CSO. Some of this is less space in more urban areas for detached homes, but a lot of it is also less homes being scattered in more remote locations (ie many of them second homes).

We are in the process of retrofitting many of the homes from that era, none of that comes into the unit by unit comparison.

“Double the homes” is just a throwaway line. What does that mean? Current unit sizes, more studios? More one beds?

Quite clearly we have a massive deficit, such that any form of increase in a short term would be gobbled up.

But if we built double the current rate of crude numbers of homes, our output per capita would be about 12 per 1,000 citizens. In 2023 the country ranked just below us was 5.88 (we were 6.12) per the Deloitte Housing Development intensity review of 19 European countries. Is that realistic? I would say again that we are too beholden to the idea of perfect planning. The dream of having all the infrastructure there for new builds is delusional. That’s part of the problem, we’ve swung the other way. This is constraining supply to a degree but you are overegging the comparison with prior decades.

My personal opinion is we need about 8 per 1,000 consistently over the next decade which is basically at the 41k figure in the latest housing plan. The current number of houses in Ireland is 395 per 1,000 people, 73 below the OECD average and implies about 350k units below what’s required. In crude terms over a decade with a growth of 7 per 1,000 (the 8 to he built minus 1 for obselecence) we’d be there or thereabouts with the OECD average. But I’d go further and say that might be actually be too many given the number of under-occupied homes in Ireland. We have a rate of 67% in Ireland vs. an European Average of 33%, the implication is that of occupied housing that we have at least 650k more rooms available within our existing housing stock than our peers. Even if we got halfway to that EU average, we’d free up 325k rooms. At say 3.5 rooms per housing unit, that’s not far off 100k less housing units needed here than any “average” implies.

The definition of Under-Occupied per Eurostat.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Glossary:Under-occupied_dwelling

The precise number of rooms is impossible to tell, I just went for 1. Another EU measure says we have one of the highest number of rooms per member of the population at 2.1, the EU average is 1.6. This implies 2.6m ish extra rooms…(Eurostat excludes kitchens, halls, bathrooms from this as well).

Ireland also has a lower “over-crowded accommodation” rate at 3.2%, versus 17.2% in the EU.

Oddly we of course have a high household size relative to most of these countries, which is counter intuitive to the above but is likely largely to do with our massive supply of 3 bedroom houses used in house shares.

So my point above on supply is that we also have to look at the type of supply and the capacity we have. I don’t believe for us to have a “normal” market that we necessarily need to be at the OECD average number of dwellings per 1,000. Sure we might prefer to all be like the Swedes and living alone at 18 but we have the housing stock we have and solutions have to be tailored to both our strengths and weaknesses. We absolutely need more studios and 1 beds but we also do have a higher proportion of higher capacity homes that are available right now and ones we are investing it to give them a longer lifespan. As much as I think it’s a waste to have UCD students in 3 bed semi Ds in Stillorgan with overgrown gardens, it’s a perfectly fine way to live in your college years as long as the rent is affordable.

It’s one of the reasons why I’m so critical of the constant range of “we actually need X” number of houses with people not putting much further thought or detail into said statement. This is even the case with some of the Housing Commissions work, as detailed as it was.

In order to help single people which I think is an acute issue, I’d actually argue we’d be better off building 30,000 studios and one beds a year for 3 or 4 years rather than say 30,000 of mixed studios to 5+ bedrooms (and as such, having a lot more capacity) houses as we do now. But we aren’t even having those discussions…sure it’s easier to just say “we should be building 60,000!”.

Back for more. You aren’t serious about this topic.

Again you misrepresented the picture and it’s fairly clear you are happy to deliberately degrade any discussion on this.

The new targets are a seperate point.

Again I ask you to outline why you think we need 60,000 and not 93,000 homes. Based on the level of your input I don’t have much hope of an intelligible response but I’ve asked you several times now.

Coming back every couple of days repeating the same misrepresentation and avoiding the topic just doesn’t cut it I’m afraid.

If your figures are correct, it would be necessary to have a functional market for it to work. The property market in Ireland has been dysfunctional for over 3 decades and that's not going to change under "no alternative" current leadership as they are doubling on policies that make the situation worse.

In the 80s you had far more people in each residential unit, little or no short term lets. There was little price difference between Dublin and rest of the country and agriculture was the dominant industry hence the one off homes at 50% in 1981. I don't know where you were in the 80s, 2nd homes were certainly not a thing

Again I'll say it if the government did nothing, we would build more homes as the future picture is much clearer with 0 or close to 0 interference.

Currently the developers are well aware that the bigger the problem gets the more they can extract from the taxpayer. Provision of most expensive "social/affordable" homes in the world is far more lucrative than meeting open market demand at the highest employment/wage rate the country has ever seen. They have there people/lobbyists dictating policy. The ministers are communications trained to hoodwink the public and the dysfunction continues.

I'm aware of several state subsidised 3 bed affordable purchase homes going to a single applicant. There is no will to tackle under utilised housing in the public sector, nevermind the private sector

I live in an estate built in the late 60s early 70s, it's has 3,4, and 5 bed units. Many of the 3 bed units have been extended over time. At least 50% of the homes are occupied by 1 person or a couple, 3 homes are empty. The estate is walking distance to every amenity and is located in the fastest job growth region in the country.

1 home has multiple families living with a local business nearby (Asian)

I agree we need to be more inventive on efficient use of housing, unfortunately that's not going to happen under the current regime. It, like everything else housing related is being made worse