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

You said Dublin and now are posting asking prices. Have a look at the property price register for 2026 and you'll get a better idea. I hate to break it to you but buying in November 2024 is not like buying in January 2026, the problem is getting exponentially worse as time goes by.

This mornings figures of 36k completions are still an utter disaster, even with all the PR spin of them being "a record high".

Our population growth is running at 100k per year, still, which by itself would account for every single one of these new builds.

Or just look at the government's own figures, which say the goal is 300k housing units in 2025-2030. Which we won't get anywhere near with yearly completions in the 30,000s.

Going from 29k completions in 2022, to 36k completions in 2025, while in the same period Ireland's population has increased by over 300,000 humans, is just not remotely keeping pace. Its a glacial growth speed. Its not making a dent in the 250k deficit, or the ongoing housing crisis, in any way.

Any way you slice it we're 40%+ below the numbers required. As far as missing KPIs goes it would be a performance bad enough to get any project manager or executive fired in the private sector.

Comparing us to other countries in Europe, who have much higher ratios per capita already, and who are in population decline or stagnation is utterly pointless. We have one of the highest yearly population growth rates in the world currently. And our home building is not remotely keeping up.

We've had 100k per year population growth for 4 years running now. "Very unlikely to persist" is purely your own speculative opinion based on no actual facts. There are billions of people out there trying to move to Europe, and our government has yet to make any commitments to drastically reduce the main sources of those coming to Ireland that it can control - student visas, work visas, and asylum seekers. The data is quite clear on this - based on the figures from Q4 2025 not dropping significantly we're going to still be taking in tens of thousands of immigrants in 2026.

This continuing runaway population growth is half of why 36k completions in 2025 is an utter disaster.

Achieving 300k total growth in housing stock by 2030, when we built 36k last year, is also not remotely mathmatically likely. We now need 264k, with one year gone, further increasing the number required for all of the remaining years.

Our output would now need to jump to 50k+ in 2026 to meet this target, which seems incredibly unlikely given the performance over the last numer of years, and given the counted commencements in 2025. Thats the other half of why 36k is an utter disaster, its tens of thousands off the 50-60k required units a year

The idea that any sector of residential housing is "about to come roaring back" is not supported by the data at all. This is the data for commencements up to Nov25, which will heavily impact completions in 2026. The total was actually below that for 2023 and 2024, its going down not up. Again, an utter disaster:

As I said this poster either knows about the waiver and chooses to lie here for handy likes or doesn’t know about it. If they don’t know about it, they really shouldn’t be contributing the paragraphs they do on this topic and start to educate themselves on it. If it’s the former, they are just wasting the time of people who want to discuss this topic seriously.

It’s really frustrating that we can’t even have sensible discussions and criticisms of government policies and government policy changes because of posters like that.

Just because the company would be public doesn't necessarily mean it would make it cheaper to build houses.

The case for a State building company is unproven, and in fact, lacks any credible argument. To date, the idea has been little more than incoherent ramblings from PBP politicians.

My brother is at the moment about to close on the sale of a 4 bed house in Dublin that was rented.

2 couples and a single person were renting it. All going to rent their own places now. There was also another couple who left early last year (got married, bought their own place) but werent replaced. I know 2 of the couples got their own apartments, as did the single person. The other couple are moving back to their parents until they can buy their own place.

That house is being sold to a couple coming back home from working in the middle east. So if all of those couples and the single person all rent or even buy their own apartments now that will be 1 property housing them all to 5 properties (4 at the moment until the couple gone home move out of home again) housing them all. And thats with only one couple who werent already in the country. The housing needs of all the others were already satisfied with one property until now.

ANd just one more thought from me on the whole supply thing. We have record numbers of 20 to 30, even 35 year olds now living with their parents. At some point most of these are going to want to leave the nest and get their own place. This is pent up demand too.

It’s one of the reasons that I personally believe that 60k housing output over the medium term is not necessary.

There’s a lot of factors here of which play against one another. As I said earlier on this thread, if you could even get Ireland halfway to the European average on under-occupancy rates then we are actually a long way to “fixing” this issue.

We don’t fully know how the retrofitting grants for houses will impact obsolescence either- this is not something governments have historically supported across the housing stock. 0.5% either way is 10,000 houses per year…

We shall see anyway. We definitely need 50-60k over the next half a decade to a decade to help with the backlog but where we end up will be interesting.

Yours is the “counter intuitive” narrative right now but may well be right. Remember that the entire narrative of this country post crash was that we lost the run of ourselves and never needed that many houses…well we did actually (maybe not all well built or in the right areas but the Bertienomics view of the macro environment was actually correct). The markets themselves also got that very wrong (and caused a global depression) as they got confused by the financial products they had invented.

There are some elements of controllables for Ireland on immigration (assuming we remain an open economy). These mostly relate to student visas and incentives for refugees to come here. Ireland could easily have half the numbers of Ukrainians if we weren’t so generous and welcoming. I’m not going to comment on the rights and wrongs of that, but it’s a fact. It’s also a fact that we have changed tact on this and “lessons have been learned”. I do not believe we will see a repeat of that for the next decade, at least.

Regarding globalisation, I don’t believe things will ultimately retreat as much as Trump would like. The genie is out of the bottle. Corporates are still going to look for transparent places to do business. The main piece here is the flows of the global economy. Ultimately Ireland’s has been at the centre of the major tech sector expansion that has continued for a decade and a half, and that won’t continue to the same degree (I’d be confident of that).

40k I believe is sustainable and easily achievable. The build to let sector alone will provide that as it recovers. My personal view is 40k is the long term number needed- getting to 50k or even 60k is more about recovering lose units from 2010 to 2019.

If we can just keep everyone locked up in their parents box room there'll be no children…yay! - less houses to build and we can even shut down a few schools!

One would have thought that a government with housing and cost of living as there top priorities would be giving all the powers required to fight this. Does government represent the people or the "developers"

The consumer watchdog has warned there is “no doubt” that cartels are operating to fix the price of publicly funded projects in Ireland.

The chairman of the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC), Brian McHugh, hopes to see more powers given to the CCPC to tackle one of the most difficult forms of fraud called “bid-rigging”.

Do you have a source for this chart? What article was it part of?

According to your chart, Wellington residents seem to spend about 57% of their income on basic cost of living, whereas Dubliners spend a whopping 70%. A lot of this seems to be rent which, again according to this chart, is about 66% higher in Dublin than Wellington! Even taking into account the higher wages in Dublin, this is a major difference.

This illustrates an error that is often made by people here when talking about rents and property prices. Sure isn't it also bad in New Zealand or [insert some other country where the media are talking about housing affordability], isn't it? Yes, these other countries complain about housing but what they are doing is complaining about a situation that has got significantly worse in recent years in their country.

What we fail to do is take into account their baseline. We assume that because it has become worse there, it is just as bad as here, when it is not.