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

Garth Brooks is taking advantage of the off season in Kerry and using his jet to avoid the car rental charges. Needs must!

Who is going to pick up the bill for affordable housing built on mass? The taxpayers.

The fact is that it costs x to build and proposing that someone only pays y (affordable) means someone will have to pay the difference between x and y otherwise property wouldn’t be built. No business is going to say less make a loss on building houses.

Jesus the internet really doesn't reflect real life

100% social housing is required nobody is arguing about that.

What I am pointing out is that people are looking for property at prices that are cheaper than the build cost and at the same giving out about government supports such as HTB grants and shared equity schemes.

Ain't that the truth. Global studies and rankings regularly put Ireland among the very highest standards of living in the entire world, and in most parts of the country towns and cities are buzzing with people enjoying life if you go outside. Everything isn't perfect or course, there have been huge global challenges affecting everyone from pandemics to climate change to energy crises and inflation, but Ireland is still coping comparatively well right now and it's a far cry from the picture painted by the misery junkies.

High housing prices are usually a side effect of booming economies and high standards of living, and that's been compounded by material and construction cost rises, just when things were ramping up after a pause caused by the pandemic. Nobody's going to wave a magic wand to fix everything but construction is still ramping up, costs are stabilizing and possibly reducing again, and we're seeing prices starting to level off to go with that. There are certainly issues with our planning system and regulations that are less than ideal, but no amount of government meddling or backing off will fix everything overnight.

What model of social housing provision would you support. There's no denying that the current system is the most expensive for the taxpayer and in addition makes it more difficult for those that aspire to provide there own accomodation thereby increasing the pool of people that need subsidised accommodation.

Social housing provision, HTB, shared ownership and almost every scheme dreamed up are all inflationary thereby moving us further away from a workable solution

As an aside, I work in a company of about 35 people, almost all under 40, with a majority born outside Ireland; including people from Brazil, Portugal, Germany, America, Argentina, Korea and of course the UK. They all seem to like Ireland quite well, or least pretend! Not a single one of them is on the streets, despite relatively modest salaries in the grand scheme of things. I really, really wonder what kind of workplaces some of those posting in this thread find themselves in, where everyone (Irish or otherwise) despises this country and wishes they could escape - we must be holding those people against their wills somehow! ;)

I agree we need social housing but I would remove the whole idea that once a person reaches 18 they register for housing support.

People should try house themselves and if unsuccessful by say 30 then register for housing support.

Evictions for anti social behaviour and non payment of rent should be streamlined. 99% of people in social housing are the nicest hardworking honest people you would ever meet

It is the 1% who destroy areas. I would remove the differential rate for calculating rent and replace it with one that takes account of household income (with no max rent fig which I believe is €260 a week) and availability of local services/amenities.

Finally I would include the type of property in the rental calculations to reflect a single person in a three bed property.

All revenue from above is then ringfenced as a self financing model specifically for social housing.

If your to solve the housing crisis fast then you need to build basic houses in new council estates like was done in the past but was stopped due to creating ghettos. The vast majority of the people don’t cause trouble so in order to deal with the few bad eggs You need powers to evict anti-social tenants. 3 strikes and they loose their right to be housed by the state. it’s far from ideal but it would be the quickest way to solve the shortage.

That is absolute rubbish. There was a global recession which affected every economy, not just Ireland. It is a testament to our resilience that though the economy was “on its knees”, we endured, and picked up again. Our economy improved before many others thanks to foreign investment, low corporate tax, prudent fiscal policies and our will to succeed. Ireland was a great place to live, even in the worst of times.

You seem to have been unleashed back to your previous iteration, just with a new moniker.

Being of the opinion that the place is booming, and that there is a prospect of the property market crashing are not mutually exclusive. The majority of people in Ireland who own property and/or have good jobs can hold the opinion that things are not as bad as people like you say they are, while accepting that costs are rising and that there is a possibility, or even a probability that property prices will fall at some stage. But having a fatalistic and myopic view that if it is bad for me, it must be bad for everyone is a nonsense. The fact is that for most people Ireland is a great place to live, we would not live anywhere else, people such as yourself believe that if you don’t get what you want, it must be bad for everyone.

Ireland is a country with a high number of well paying jobs, there are a hell of a lot of people in their 20s and 30s who are paid a lot, they are your competition when you try to buy a home, that is life.

The flaw, is that you think that just because you have an education and/or a job, you deserve to be able to buy a property wherever you want. And yet there you are in the land of clocks, happy, but unable to afford to buy a home. Go figure.

One of the downsides of the recovery in our economy and the success of some people, is that we have a generation who now think that they are owed what others have by virtue to sharing the same nationality.

Widom is borne of experience, advice is a form of nostalgia where we leave out the bad parts and focus on the good that we want to pass on. We did not ever live in a country/economy without debt, it has always been there, and it always will. Neither you nor I, nor our contemporaries will “cover” the cost of this mess, nor will we be required to. Every economy exists in a state where debt is managed, sometimes it goes up, sometimes down, but we don’t all lose the run of ourselves, and we don’t all think it defines us, or this country. At this moment, the savings that people have on deposits in banks has rarely been higher, even during the last boom. The problem this time is that there are a lot more people with high incomes and savings so they can outspend and outbid people their own age. That is unfortunate, but we all make choices, some choose careers that pay more. You see a country that is terrible, most of us just get on with life, we have seen worse times than you see now, and we still managed. The problem now is that you and others think that a country with full employment, a good quality of life, a good education system, for the most part an happy population, is awful because you aren’t thriving. Anyone that thinks things aren’t tougher now as a result of higher prices is in denial, but Ireland is not unique in that, we didn’t cause Covid or start a war in Ukraine. There probably isn’t an economy in the world which hasn’t seen prices/debt rise as a result of global events. Things may get worse before they get better, but history shows that this has always been the way.

If you are not happy here, the world is a big place.

Again, with experience comes knowledge.

People like you cry “why me? Why can’t I buy a home?, I deserve to be able to”. Our economy have recovered incredibly well from being on our knees 10 yrs ago. So much so that we have full employment even though our population is at its highest since pre famine times. People have not had to emigrate for jobs for almost a decade, that is a stark contrast to what went before. But an unfortunate side effect is that house building didn’t keep pace.

Our experience tells us that over supply of housing helped to exacerbate the last recession, then, developers were pariahs because they built too many units and people fell into mortgage debt traps. Now they don’t build enough, yet they and the Government are still pariahs.

You and your like wallow in misery, you do not see that for most people our economy’s recovery has been a positive. Those MNC‘s that so many think are the root of all evil have created jobs for our highly educated tech graduates, who would have had to emigrate otherwise. The consequence of that? They have the money to spend, MNCs put 16bn in direct wage payments into our economy last year, the trickle down effect to other businesses/people is enormous. Is this a bad thing? Only if you think success is bad, begrudgery is good.

The French embassy posted about accommodation, so what? Are they telling you anything you don’t know, does it affect our lives in any way? No it doesn’t, in a couple of days time only people like you will think what someone in the French embassy thinks is important. But it suits your narrative.

I think you and your comrades could do with being a little more “me Fein” and do a little less whinging that the Government/society isn’t helping you more.

Greed drives economies, profit allows expansion, without both, what do you think drives business owners to succeed? You call it stubbornness, maybe we are just mentally stronger and more durable than you.

On one point I do agree with you though, State intervention has completely wrecked the rental market. RPZ legislation and failure to address the difficulty in removing errant tenants has contributed to LLs leaving the sector. But SF are about to make it worse, so be careful what you wish for.