Softening house market?

That's extremely interesting, it may very well be under pressure.

Back in 2019, CRH offloaded a poor enough preforming European distribution company to them for 1.9 billion and Blackstone gladly swept it up. If CRH couldn't squeeze anymore productivity out of it then I'd say Blackstone could have got burned badly by that deal.

Be no loss seeing a few institutional landlords get a rude awakening and if one falls then the spotlight will be on all the others balance sheets.

The things that old people go on about being luxuries are often not actually luxuries in modern times because they are now relatively cheap. "In my day I was only able to fly to London twice a year whereas now I see some young people going back and forth for a few long weekends a year" .... which doesn't take into account that a flight back in the day might have been more than a weeks wages whereas the student today is probably getting over and back for 20 quid. I hear that some of these pampered students these days even insist in indoor toilets rather than sh1tting into a bucket in a breezy outhouse too.

And I'm not sure where you are getting this guff about en-suites. I know a good few current students. One coming to mind now who is living in the front room of a rented house she shares with a gang of other students in Dublin. I don't think she demanded an en-suite be installed off of what is supposed to be a sitting room.

Dwic we have managed to automate many processes, especially in the area of technology. The amount of automation in building is relatively small compared to elsewhere in industry it exists but it has taken more the risk and manual labour out of certain areas of it.

On you example of air travel an air hostess in the 70's probably earned 20-30% more than a tradesperson and did 50% of the hours they do now. An airline pilot was a demi god back then. But I am not going to digress in there.

Most specific provided student accommodation will have a high percentage of ensuites. Even where rooms ate not in specific student accomodation it is mostly two rooms to a bathroom in exceptional cases three rooms

Regarding the guff about en-suites, I refer to my comment about how certain posters in this forum only know a handful of people under 35, and those they know are wasteful rich kids with iPhone 14s and 222 Golfs and don’t understand how the other 99% of people under 35 live.

But that increase in living standard costs, somebody somewhere is or has paid for it.

You seem to think that those in the construction sector should return to the virtual indentured slavery that was there lot until the noughties.

We have shifted resources away from the basic of food and shelter and transfered them to lifestyle choices.

The biggest factor in housing is supply. Because of restricted supply we have the issue we are trying to deal with. However the resources required are in more demand and there is less of them

That is in either Labour, skills or materials.

What would you make more money off? Building a block of 50 student apartments with en-suites and selling them for say 200k each, or throwing up 10 semi-Ds on the same site and selling them for 400k each? Building something from greenfield or brownfield is usually more economic than trying to retrofit. I think that these en-suites you are referring to are newly purpose built student housing.

Your own standard of living today is likely higher than your grandparents was at your age. I doubt it's because they were lazy or eating too many avocados. I'm using that example to point out that it isn't really valid to do a simple comparison of standards from different time periods. You comparing your own late teens or early 20's to late teens or early 20's of today and concluding something from it would be the same as me comparing your own standard of living today with your grandparents back then and concluding they must have been lazy because they didn't have a centrally heated house and freezer full of foods from around the world.

Well, below is an example of your own stellar contribution from just above

Luckily you warned us Nostradamus. Although it's not really fair to be teasing us and not telling us the details of your secret knowledge and insight.

Thread is about the housing market. I commented above on people trying to get their investments out of a massive property investment fund. And also that purpose built accommodation with dreaded en-suites might not be that inefficient compared to "traditional" housing.

It's amazing how we're in December now yet months ago on here people were predicting the economy would be in a ball by now. Hasn't happened.

Yes some small businesses may close in January but its not near as grim as predicted

You are gone off on another tangent completely again Donald but I will explain to you

It would be moot which would be more profitable. The student apartments would take longer to get planning and cost multiples to design. As well the builder would have to complete the structure either through bank or other finance and will see no profit until the complete structure is finished. The ten houses semi D's

Could be stage build and sold even if not it would be a relatively easy process to finance and build with less regulations to be adhered to. It actually shows you lack of understanding of of the building sector. Pre COVID I remember reading an article of somewhat similar issues in Commuter towns in Cork, one served by a rail connection the LA had a density requirements that needed about 50,% apartments in site, builder were not building on the sites as there was not that demand for that density. They could sell semiD's and townhouses but there was very little demand for apartments

On my grandparents both them and my greatGP, farmed and made a living off a farm, actually they were extremely well off ( for there time)as there was an Orchard and they sold a lot of eating apples( before the advent of Grannysmiths and Pink Ladies). However agriculture efficiency now means the same farm was is not cable of sustaining less than the minimum wage.

Productivity changed the living to be got from it. Considering that they had a good standard of living for there era now there is no sustainable income from it.

From the 60- now cheap energy drove living standards. Only in the 90/00's did discretionary income spending balloon. Now because resources are more expensive and availability being curtailed it discretionary spending is coming under threat.

Basically what that means is that building cost more due to a multiple of factors

There is a bit of softening in the market but not sure if that's down to interest rates etc, due to the time of year or being overpriced to start with.

We went sale agreed in August for 85k over asking. We got 60k over asking on our sale. Probably around an increase of 12/15% respectively on the asking prices.

We missed out on a lot of house and tracked them when they closed so I feel I have a decent idea of the value in the area we looked at. The asking price means nothing because generally estate agents just put it up at around the price something similar sold for.

I've seen a few houses go up recently that were at least 10% overpriced to start with and either have dropped in price or have no bids on them yet.

Ignoring possible effects of interest rates the above would seem sensible.

Only counter is average earnings are up about 13% from Q3 2019 to now and probably looking at at least another 5% next year with inflation running high.

Constantly rising wages is something that I worry about. We're already seeing very large rises in the public sector and a lot of the private sector. This simply adds up to more cash that chases a limited supply of goods. Ergo, more inflation.

Wage stagnation is bad.

Rising wages is bad.

Solution is still to build more houses.

very similar to Ireland.

It's both. Supply chains were disrupted by lockdowns, and the "solution" of printing more money added to inflation.

It takes time to build a house or an apartment block, and rising costs are making that more difficult. There's no one-bullet to the housing crisis. We need a discussion that considers building, immigration, social welfare, investment funds and all other aspects that have contributed to this mess. Sadly, this discussion was needed years ago, and it's seemingly not possible to have discourse anymore without people screaming at each other.