Softening house market?

There are 10 houses for sale and 40 people looking to buy.

Of those 40, 20 have deposits, 20 cannot afford to save a deposit (due to high rents etc).

Currently 20 people are chasing 10 houses, 10 people will always be outbid. If a scheme like HTB helps the other 20 to raise a deposit, now we have a situation where 40 people are chasing the same 10 houses, so 30 people will always be outbid.

Prices will actually go higher because we now have extra buyers, so ultimately all we have done is use government money to push house prices even higher. Anyone supporting HTB or similar schemes is a fool. More supply is the only solution.

Slightly off topic but the One Stop Shop (OSS) intitiave from SEAI for renovating homes has done nothing but hike up renovation prices significantly as the providers just see it as a price gouge opportunity on homeowners.

It is an issue. But help to buy itself is part of the reason things are broken \ it further breaks things.

It is not a solution. It is treating a symptom and it has side effects on the 'disease'.

sheesh, your personal circumstances, you already said you were both on decent money with an 18 month old, how much more personal are you gonna get

if you are on good money and have been saving for say 10 years then you should already have a deposit

if you are in your 30s and have only started saving a few years, well that's your issue right there

The supply of housing is the only thing at play

We were between lockdowns in Summer 2021 and you couldn't get a viewing unless you were sale agreed.

1yr later we're out of COVID. Supply is still shockingly low, but it's unsurprising that it's climbing slowly. Apparently a good chunk of sales are landlords selling up, which will be a blip of surplus.

not really, the number of houses on the market is tiny still

this fluctuates seasonally

if one person puts a house on the market and stays in the market, they need somewhere to move to, zero extra capacity

if the population outstrips the number of new builds, which is does, you have less supply

I volunteered that info (a mistake, in hindsight!), it wasn't in response to some randomer asking me directly.

I'd say my quotes were a lot more through SEAI OSS providers than just the grant amount. I got 2 quotes for external wrap insulation while I was waiting on OSS to come back. Bother were between 15-18k. OSS provider kindly quoted me 31k.

Can move the topic from HTB and all that jazz, to the actual softening of the housing market?

What would supply normally be?

Its also LLs aging and retiring out. Fewer younger LLS getting into it. The transfer seems to be into institutions and owner occupiers.

But as others have said it still all supply and demand driving this.

Sure what difference does it make to some randomer, you are totally anonymous

I made a dashboard which tracks Dublin, and mainly areas in south Dublin where I am looking. Only tracks houses. But the amount of listing is definitly trending up.

also some commuter towns.

Yes - but nothing makes a great twitter headline like "house prices now crashing".

Looking at it in historical context prices went completely bonkers since the pandemic, and Sydney, Melbourne & Auckland in particular needed to fall by roughly 30% simply to return to pre-covid levels. Not saying they aren't over valued either, just that the high prices were never sustainable.

Also when comparing to the Irish market its worth noting new mortage holders there are more susceptable to interest raterises as they are more leveraged, compred to here where we have LTIs of 3.5x

In Auckland over 50% of new mortgages had an LTI of over 6x, while in Aus it is just under 25%.

would you stretch the graph out across say 5 years? might make some sense then