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

The country to grow up and realise that high unaffordable house prices are a ball and chain around the ankles of our children and catastrophic for the economy. It is literally shooting yourself in the foot.

You are waiting for 5 million people to “grow up” and come around to your way of thinking?

Anybody in there late 30's had option to buy from 2011-2016. Apartments were the price of top of the range cars in Dublin and mid rage cars in every other city in Ireland. They either had no savings after 4-8 years of work or waited for there forever home. There was options they choose not to take them options.

Oh for sure, what with the high paid jobs they had been working in since the late 200... Oh

You think things were better in the 80’s when your two couples bought their homes? there was mass unemployment, emigration, social unrest, Charlie Haughey going on TV telling us we were living beyond our means? They could buy houses because they were lucky enough to have jobs, at that time bank jobs were “jobs for life” so they had a much better chance to getting a mortgage/buying a home.

You seem to understand why people couldn’t buy when prices were rock bottom during a recession when there was unemployment, lower wages, lack of credit, but unable to understand why people can’t buy when there is full employment, a good percentage have high wages/savings and access to credit. Why is that?

Meeting the housing shortage is meaningless if those units are being allowed to be hoovered up by rent farming funds. Just because it's a similar situation in many markets around the world doesn't validate the situation. It shows that international funds being allowed to rent farm has been normalised as conventional wisdom, despite these funds adding nothing to the economy.

A lot of the developments of the last five years didn't even make it to the open market, they were sold directly to rent farming funds. The maddening thing about this situation is that its the elderly cohort whose pension funds outbid the essential workers needed for the aging population.

Our current situation is not an accident. It is by design. Whether deliberate design or sheer ignorance is unimportant. It is a direct result of decisions made by our government.

Of course I understand why people cannot afford a home, that's precisely what we're talking about! House ownership is increasingly being limited to a certain subset of society, the reasons for this are clear. But you don't look at an outcome and say 'well that's the way it is, oh well', you look at the root cause. And some of us hold contention with how we got to this point.

So did you ask every single person who came to live in Ireland are they intending on staying here? I know I went to Oz for a year earned more cash and had a great lifestyle and came back with enough cash for a deposit in Ireland but I never intended on staying over there indefinitely. I am pretty sure some see Ireland as a way to make a lot of cash and head home sure it is common place in my company we had Polish, Lithuanian, Brazilian and Turkish workers for a number of years and making enough cash to go back home and have a decent lump sum for a house back home. So we do need rentals.

as I pointed out a lot of first world countries are the same with regards to being unaffordable such as US- New York, France-Paris, England-London and that list goes on and on that is how it has gone globally areas where there is a lot of demand for will always be out of reach for the average worker on the average wage..

I do agree with restricting REITS or they should be taxed at 51% like our workers here and that money used to build social houses.

And do you bear any responsibility for helping yourself out of it?

There are a multitude of reasons why we have arrived at this point, ignorance is thinking they are all attributable to bad policies by a Government. It is to ignore the part played by the success of our economy in providing jobs, attracting inward migration, having savings that allow for purchases etc.

The irony may be lost on you, but one of the reasons there are so many bidders with higher financial resources pushing up the price of property, is because for some sectors there are fantastic job opportunities here which have drastically reduced the need to emigrate. Work from home now means that those highly paid people can move out of Dublin, pushing up the prices in rural areas. Is that bad policy making, to have a thriving tech/pharma sector and allow people to wfh? Of course not. Can you build houses at the rate jobs are created? Also, of course not.

I think it might be the leaders of said country that need to wake up, the population are paying for the last bust, they have an ink link to the potential damage.

Again, a very simplistic way of looking at the current problem. Successive Governments have done well to lift Ireland out of recession and provide conditions for full employment and inward investment leading to good, high paying jobs. There were many reasons for the "last bust", some not under the control of our Government, unless you want to blame them for a global economic collapse. One of the largest contributing factors domestically, and something the Government did have to take responsibility for, was the lack of regulation in the building sector and financial markets which meant people borrowed far beyond their means to invest in rapidly built, shiite properties. When the recession came, too much debt, to many houses. That has now been corrected making it more difficult to over borrow, and building regs have been improved. The fact that there are so many people who have well paying jobs which allows them to borrow more as a result of having a higher wage for the mortgage multiplier cap, and houses are more expensive to build because of the regs, is hardly an indication of poor policy decisions, unless of course you think people should be able to borrow without a ceiling. That of course would risk repeating the mistakes of the Celtic tiger years.

The fact is that some sectors of society, particularly those who went into the tech/financial/pharma/trades fields are doing very well at the moment, high wages, high capacity to borrow are competing with people in average paying jobs, they no longer need to emigrate, so they are competing with you for the limited stock of properties available. Will SF change that? No, and if they try to, they risk killing the golden goose which has driven our economy forward and helped us out of recession. And if you think that is a price worth paying, then consider that the MNC's alone put over €16bn into our economy in direct payroll, the benefit of that is most assuredly felt by those shops, mechanics, pubs, restaurants, etc, jobs that lower paid workers rely on, not to mention the tax take from their wages which pay to run the PS/CS services.

Well historically or up until the the naughties we exported workers or at least we had more people leaving than coming in this has really shifted around and more people are now coming to live in Ireland than leaving so no its very new for Ireland now weather thats people coming in via MNCs for jobs it means others are paying more tax to protect corpo taxes or welfare tourists coming for our really high welfare rates, this also has to be paid for.

I’m not sure what you are asking here, is it for yourself or someone else?

Your concern for the sustainability of the economy is admirable.

The 2 key drivers of same were corporation tax changes and "free" third level education. The corpo tax is coming under increased international pressure and free third level is being diluted by extortionate rents on below standard accomodation and creeping registration fees.

Affordable housing would be a game changer for the economy similar to corporation taxes and could be a revenue gereator for the state as opposed to a large and growing liability. It would allow us to address our growing national debt

Separately government have been fighting and circumventing prudent financial regulation and complicit in poor and costly building regulations