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

True but ring up and when asking about a lot of the older stock if you put them in chron order on myhome they are sale agreed/sold. Its really frustrating

Apartments are always more expensive to build than houses. The deciding factor is usually site cost. If the site costs is high it makes apartments viable to build.

That is why 4-5 story apartments are not viable in larger towns or some urban areas. You have to factor the area around the apartments as well into the footprint.

In general we do not have area in urban setting to compensate for lack of a back garden and a common area or roadway at the front of a house. Because of Irish weather (we are a quite wet country) you cannot be guaranteed a lot of days to hear off with the bikes or the pram for a few hours and not get wet.

Most apartments are designed for a couple or a single person. Again high build costs in Dublin discrimate against apartments. The fact also that the complete structure has to be finished before you start getting your funding back is a deterrent.

A builder would want a higher margin on am apartment block because of the risks involved. As you go up in the number of levels the extra building costs rise expodentially.

Our problem at present is getting units build especially in Dublin. How we do that is the question. The state owned a lot of land in Dublin. It should be releasing some. As well there is an amount of brown field sites zoned industrial which should be redesignated residential but a number of left leaning councillors have this daft idea that we can attract industry back into the city

Demand for jobs is elastic too, and as it becomes harder to attract new hires here in Ireland there will be less and less new job announcements, with more investment going elsewhere in Europe.

If tax was the same across Europe yes…but it’s not so jobs unlikely to elsewhere in Europe

The higher you go the more has to be charged for maintenance and facilities to the owners. People in Ireland dont want to be paying €5 - €10k per year on top of buying the apartments. Ive been in apartment complexes in other countries that have swimming pools, cinemas, party rooms, meeting rooms and lots of maintained park style areas around them. That doesnt happen in Ireland. Well it does in one or two places, but if you look what the landlord has to pay monthly for them then you will see why the rent is so expensive.

Thats why you build highrise. More apartments to spread the cost. €10K in mgmt fees for a reasonably well spec'd apartment is very unlikely. That kind of money is limited to luxury builds.

There is clear demand for highrise in this country. Planning, not management fees, is what is stopping many developments progressing from a concept into a feasability stage in the first instance.

Building design in housing estates is repetitive as well. However you go higher you need more and higher specification steel structures in the building. As well you need higher specification concrete. Add to that more space for utilities and lift shafts. Labour to get up and down costs extra. Pumping concrete up to a 3-4 floor high building is easy compared to going ten+ levels high.

Take building a 4 level block of 60 apartment. If the next 4floors cost after that costs 10k/apartment extra in specification this cost is added to all 8 levels of apartment. You will have to reduce apartment size accross the 8 blocks for to add lift shaft and utilities. But in reality the building cost is because of the extra 4 levels and is maybe 25-30k per each of these apartments.

As I said, yes building costs naturally increase as you go higher, but not exponentially as you said.

Costs increase, but some of this is offset through economies of scale, again in repetition of design and construction. Its just how the whole high-rise model works. I appreciate your example and you make valid points. But it is not like for like as your example is essentially a mid-rise building. The economics are different.

For starters it would have a much larger footprint compared to a 40 storey building with the same floor plan going straight up for the majority of floors. The 35th floor can have nearly same floor area as the 12th. Both structural and services design is different and can be quite a lot more expensive. But over many units it can become cost effective to the point where a return on investment can be made.

Are you suggesting that it is not economically feasible to build high-rise in this country?

I would suggest it very much is so. As @JimmyVik alluded to above, there is demand for this type of product. High quality, city centric apartments and there are developers who want to do this.

And I am not suggesting this would cure our ills in any way. But it would all add to supply.

There isnt the demand you think in Ireland for it though. Part V takes care of any demand you might have for people paying luxury prices. They just wont pay it if they are not surrounded by people who also paid for that level of luxury. So those people will all go for nice big houses instead.

Then you are back to building the poverty spec for the apartments in the high rise, but with much higher service charges for the tenants who will not be able to pay them, even if they could pay the high rise increased cost.

Thats the problem, know one knows what the demand is.

Lets me be clear here. Im advocating for removal of height limits in certain areas such as central dublin for apartments controlled by good planning policies and design guidelines.

If we dont do this, we will never know what the demand is.

@iColdFusion pointed out some of the issues. You over rate the repetitive savings. These decrease expodentially while the cost per floor rises expodentially.

The other factors is that design and engineering specifications at planning stage are much dearer per unit that ordinary houses due to its specialist nature. It's only on sites where the site is much more expensive than building costs that apartments are the only option

Again, is your point that it is not economically feasible to build high-rise in this country?

But even if the cost to build per unit increases as you go up, the land cost per unit is surely going down and would offset this..?

Our apartment regulations are taking the piss on a few fronts, % of apartments needing dual aspects, ratio of lifts to apartments.

The guidelines are very strongly anti north facings too

None of the apartments per stair/lift core, or minimum sqm per bedroom regulations apply to built to rent developments though, which explains their popularity. Same goes for shared/co-living accommodation, no Part V

No wonder most people dont buy irish apartments!