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

Thestart

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118170196#Comment_118170196

I don’t believe for a second that investment vehicles in Ireland are remotely balancing the taxes lost with the jobs they create. Reits just suck all the money out of the country to already very wealthy individuals. We would be far better with smaller resident landlords with better legislation for renters and landlords. I am looking forward to seeing the RTBs data on rents prices/ increases and who is gouging the renter when they get around to collecting it. They just give out basic headline grabbing information to justify their existence.

Timing belt

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118170602#Comment_118170602

Regardless of whether it is a Reit, Institutional investor or a small landlord they will all try and get the highest rent they can.

The very 'wealthy individuals' are actually mainly pension funds and investments from the man on the street 90% of the time

Villa05

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118169417#Comment_118169417

Are new homes loosing their appeal with increased social housing allocations?

Better to pay for what you know than what you don't know

Thestart

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118170888#Comment_118170888

The problem is the 90% man on the street is not on an Irish street so the tax is lost. It makes no sense to just let this happen. I know we need housing built and outside money is required. So let the funds finance the developers but not bulk rent the stock.

i just can’t see this ending well. I know we have ok lending rules but if a few of the big players decided they needed to leave the market quickly it could be like 2008 again and that’s no good for anyone. 40,000 units up for sale with and without tenants. Developers finance stopped mid build!

or they stay and continue to increase rents.

look at what villa05 is saying above re new builds, it’s such a different landscape out there. New builds was were FTB’s wanted but that’s a riskier situation now. it doesn’t make sense.

JimmyVik

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118170196#Comment_118170196

I had a nice sum of money myself that I wanted to invest.

My first choice was rental properties and I did a lot of research on them. In the end it wasnt for me.

So I bought ETFs and shares with it. That was a few years ago now and the returns are better than I would have got with rentals. Also no work involved. And no new legislation working against me being piled on top twice a year.

If I was advising anyone with money to invest now, I would definitely say dont invest it in rental property in Ireland.

Looks like the vast majority are aware if that now anyway, with even current investors pulling their money out of it and selling up.

Leave it to the REITs.

JimmyVik

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118172686#Comment_118172686

100% they are. I know I would never buy in a new estate now. Lots of people I know feel the same way. I even know some who pulled out of a purchase when they found out about the social housing allocation around them (especially where more houses were bought by the council). Though some people will just buy wherever they can and have to roll the dice on the amount of social housing around them.

Amadan Dubh

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118173169#Comment_118173169

We've abandoned the idea of buying a new build if we buy and will hold off a few years (not in a rush) to get a bigger deposit for something more mature.

The problems we have with new builds are that they are on top of one another with little privacy in the gardens, social housing neighbours risk and then the third reason being that the estates are generally not serviced well in terms of amenities; they are usually at the edge of towns and along busy roads (I'm talking about the ones in Wicklow btw). Even though they are generally lovely homes and there's Help the Brickie, it's not worth it for the hundreds of thousands of euro being handed over!

Thestart

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118170888#Comment_118170888

Let’s see the data from the RTB if it ever appears.

Who is putting the rent up to the max on time every time.

who is driving the big increases in rents.

iColdFusion

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118150247#Comment_118150247

Pretty shocking that report is from 2016 and its all basic straightforward practical suggestions that could have kept house prices reasonable but was completely ignored by that and successive governments, the fact that the UK dropped new build VAT to 0% should have been an alarm bell to us at the time but Irish governments are only interested in whats happening in other countries when it involves increasing taxes 🙄

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118165408#Comment_118165408

The planning system is beyond borked, much like the country really. There are no prospects either will be unborked in your lifetime.

Timing belt

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118172686#Comment_118172686

I am sure this is a factor….the other thing that it might be is where people may have bought of the plans at the price at the time and they are only feeding through now when the execution of the property took place.

Thephantomsmask

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118174650#Comment_118174650

I think this has a big part to play. Buying off plans seems to command a lower price as people have to wait.

The development we are buying in (handover before Christmas hopefully) advertised the next phase a few months back with approx 5 to 10% added to the price we paid. These houses won't be ready for another 10 months or so. Another development nearby announced their prices for houses that will be sold ready to move in in the next few weeks and they are all 10 to 15% over the equivalent spec house in our development, I guess because there is no wait time.

ETA I guess what I am trying to badly explain is that someone buying a built house in the new development is paying an extra 15 to 20% depending on house spec over someone who bought off plans in my development 12 months ago even though will both receive the house at roughly the same time.

Amadan Dubh

Ronan Lyons' weekly piece in the Currency out today (I'm not a shill for paid-for media publications but The Currency is good value for what you get). Some truly shocking information in the article. He reckons we need to see 40,000 new rentals in Dublin by 2025 to see rents come down and the same again to 2030 (in addition to rentals outside of Dublin). He also laments DCC's totally ineffective housing goals, but it does seem there are some vested interests pulling the strings in DCC HQ.

€2k per month average rent in Dublin; average! Total disconnection with salaries and salaries is the barometer for what should be affordable rents.

Another big issue is connected to our economic growth and company expansion; Ireland cannot handle job announcements in the hundreds anymore, it is as simple as that. The maths do not add up as the employees will have no where to live and it is not an exaggeration to say that there may actually be no where for the employees to live very soon.

https://thecurrency.news/articles/66252/inside-irelands-rental-crisis-policy-failures-construction-costs-and-the-magic-number-when-supply-meets-demand/

Dublin had sat out much of the rental market pressures during 2020, enjoying instead a brief respite after a decade of rental shortages, as the city entered lockdown and people fled its expensive rental market while they could.

But how quickly that has disappeared. There were just 800 rental listings in the capital on November 1, a new low.

In the early 1990s, a home in Dublin cost no more, give or take, than a home in the rest of the country. Now, less than three decades later, a Dublin home is twice as expensive as a home in the rest of the country. In 2020, the average open market rent in Dublin was €2,028, while in Ireland outside the five big cities it was €1,022. This even allows for the fact that Dublin homes are, on average, smaller reflecting smaller household size in the capital. 

Almost 100,000 new rental homes are currently in various elements of the pipeline. Almost 45,000 of those look likely to happen, as things stand, while the other 50,000 or so will have to work their way through the planning process. The more homes advertised for rent, the more downward pressure there is on rents in the capital. The ‘magic number’ – to the extent that there is one – is about 12,500. If fewer than this number of rental homes are available in the capital, rents tend to get pulled up because of greater demand. Where more than this number are listed, rents go the other way. The contrast between mid-2009, when almost 20,000 homes were rented, and 2018-2019, when on average fewer than 6,500 were, is stark.

Across Ireland’s next four cities combined – Cork, Galway, Limerick and Waterford – there were just 81 homes available to rent on November 1. This is down from 258 on the same date two years previously, which in turn had reflected very tight markets across those cities, where over the course of 2010s there had usually been over 1,000 homes available to rent.

To get new rental homes built outside Dublin, policymakers will need to stop ignoring the elephant in the room – construction costs. It is simply not viable, given prevailing construction costs and building regulations, to build a two-bedroom apartment in a six-storey building for monthly rent of less than €1,600 and realistically much less than €2,000, once site costs are accounted for.

Within the next ten days, Dublin City Council will publish its draft Development Plan for the period 2022-2028. Based on what we know so far, it is very likely that it will show the Council’s frankly baffling attitude to the city’s housing shortages. The Council has taken very much a low figure for housing need and is likely to give an estimate that the city needs just 27,000 new homes over the entire seven-year period of its new Development Plan. And of those, only 4,000 – fewer than 700 per year – would be new homes in the private rental market.

cnocbui

Ireland has the same problem France has; in having a single major city where seemingly every enterprise wants to be located, leading to the majority of the population following suit because of the jobs. I'm not sure it would be enough, but it might be worth trying a corporate tax based on a formula where the tax rate is an inverse of the companies distance from population centres.

Flinty997

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118175665#Comment_118175665

In fairness successive Govts have driven the concentration of everything in Dublin for many years now. Its not accidental.

Amadan Dubh

Interesting thing I heard today in my company; an employee of our Irish entity is actually permanently based out of Ireland operating in a couple of different EU jurisdictions, but this creates no tax issue apparently. The employee isn't a contractor but a directly employed worker. I wasn't involved in the reasoning and tax is not my area but I was surprised to hear that. We're not a large company by any means but I wonder how this tallies with the assessments carried out for the bigger (in particular) tech MNCs operating in Ireland whose Irish entities' employees are to a little or large extent now scattered across Europe.

This would be extremely relevant to judge whether the lights will ever come back on in all those Grand Canal Dock rentals!

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118172686#Comment_118172686

And do you know all your neighbours if they buy themselves?

sick of this attitude, that's half the problem in Ireland, the snobby stuck up attitude people have towards social housing

Timing belt

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118176361#Comment_118176361

Is he/she in a decision making or sales role?

iColdFusion

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118176736#Comment_118176736

Nothing stuck up about it really, new houses are very expensive so that's two people who worked hard in school, very likely went through years of college, got good secure jobs by presumably working hard, have sacrificed and saved for multiple years to be in a position to buy, fought through all the hassle and hoops of mortgage approval and trying to get secure a new build these days, then months more of paying rent while house gets built while still saving for items not included in build cost like furniture, flooring etc only to finally after 10+ years of hard work to move into a new house that in reality is at least 30 years of debt.

Why would they not be annoyed to be living beside someone who got their house paid for by the taxpayer? It doesn't really sound like the fairness in society politicians keep going on about does it?

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118177549#Comment_118177549

That's jealousy.

if they are jealous, go on the dole and live that life. They won't have to worry about buying a house then will they?

Amadan Dubh

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118177437#Comment_118177437

Sales.

Timing belt

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118177884#Comment_118177884

That is surprising! If he is selling from a different jurisdiction there are a lot of laws and tax rules to comply with it...... I am assuming the company has done it's due diligence and is paying the necessary taxes or else that it is a temporary thing with a strong case (such as a very sick relative etc.)

The reason I say it is that there was an article in the FT a couple of weeks ago that show's just how strict the rules in Ireland are:

https://www.ft.com/content/0b5cf43c-4d18-4e35-9978-6575c07072bc

Villa05

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118176736#Comment_118176736

I'm sick of this snobbery too. Working people can't afford to rent or buy in areas of high social housing

Amadan Dubh

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118178230#Comment_118178230

I also saw that article recently which is why I was a bit surprised from what I heard today. Though I wonder if my company only did a tax assessment for themselves and how it would impact the tax situation for the company? Whereas the issue with the employee is presumably his own personal tax situation as a result of being based in anther EU country despite being employed via Dublin.

From my limited knowledge of these tax issues, a company won't be in much danger of anyone claiming it is not tax resident in Ireland if it still has its key managerial and director roles based here, whereas the personal tax situation for individual, less important employees isn't really the company's concern, I think.

Flinty997

There's more to it than snobbery. That's simplistic. It's populist sentiment from the media and politicians that they know will find a ready audience. As does the anti landlord rhetoric and look where that's got us.

You should be blaming the govt (and opposition). They are happy if people point the finger at each other instead of them.

JimmyVik

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118177578#Comment_118177578

Not really.

Its just reality.

People who work to the bone and pay a fortune for their houses would like to live around like minded people.

When I take a drive through the local estates i can tell a lot of the houses that are social just by looking at them (not all of them mind you, but a good proportion) and i would not want to have paid half a milion for the house next door, because if i ever wanted to move the value of that house would take a big hit.

I would like my neighbors to be invested just as much as i am into keeping their houses and the neighborhood nice.

MacronvFrugals

A few months ago a poster on here joked about "every two bit chancer" looking to get involved in the leasing game.....

UK arms firm strikes housing lease deal with Dublin council

BAE Systems pension fund to lease recently-acquired family homes for social housing

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/uk-arms-firm-strikes-housing-lease-deal-with-dublin-council-1.4730697?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fnews%2Fireland%2Firish-news%2Fuk-arms-firm-strikes-housing-lease-deal-with-dublin-council-1.4730697

timmyntc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118179249#Comment_118179249

"The Iranian Revolutionary Guard pension Fund are proud to announce a joint-venture with Dublin City Council to lease up to 400 apartments for social housing."

"Al Qaeda Investment Group strike explosive lease deal with DCC to deliver 100 bombastic social houses"

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118178959#Comment_118178959

That's the snobby stuck up attitude I mean. You think you're better then people in social housing. And this idea that people who don't own their houses don't care about them? What is that rubbish?

it's a real Irish mentality and I can only presume that it comes from somewhere that Irish begrudery comes from.

What we need is a mixed society.

Flinty997

Actually its moral hazard. You see snobbery because you want to see snobbery.

No doubt sometimes its snobbery but there's more to it than simplistic snobbery.

The mixed housing I assume you're thinking of is the popularly known as the Vienna Model AFAIK.