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

It is the future assumptions about population growth and new build completions that are potentially problematic.

There is no point in coming up with an estimate of pent up demand based on a shortfall of previous assumptions they may have been incorrect, either to the low or the high side. We know what has already happened in terms of population size and houses built.

The idea of making an assumption about a backlog of pent up demand is ridiculous.

To calculate future housing need projections you need:

• Current population size
• Current average household size.
• Current housing stock number

With these figures you can work out what is the current spare housing capacity (if any).

Once you have that as a starting point, you can then make assumptions about future required spare capacity, changes in population size and household size snd make projections.

Does this make sense?

I found the source of the 33,000 new builds per annum - it is an ESRI report in conjunction with the Dept of Housing.

It has a huge amount of detail and clever assumptions concerning future population growth, based on mortality, fertility, migration rate etc.

And obviously they use this to make their best guess at population growth, and thus they calculate we need in one of their scenarios 33,000 new build units a year. It is this scenario that was used for the Housing for All declared targets.

But as far as I can see, nowhere in the report do they state what they are basing the starting point from - for all the modelling about future population growth and consequent housing demand, they publish nothing about the current population size, housing stock and spare capacity.

Their assumptions about future population growth may well be correct, but if they are not factoring in whether we have 0%, 2%, 20% or even -10% spare capacity from the present, the figure presented for future housing demand is meaningless.

This is the same across every future housing demand projection I have seen, hence why I said earlier I have not seen a credible projection.

https://www.esri.ie/system/files/publications/RS111.pdf

I'm just a guy that believes the data does not support the narrative. Some people do think that makes me a conspiracy theorist.

I am not claiming the census is an estimate. Quite the opposite, that's the point. I agree it's an accurate figure.

But the accurate figures from the census tell us that there is spare stock. Whereas the narrative tells us there is no spare stock.

Which is more likely to be correct? The census or the narrative?

Thanks for posting, it's a good example of exactly what I am talking about in that it focusses almost exclusively about what might happen re future population growth and forecasts numbers to accommodate that future growth.

The only attempt they make to address whether we are ahead/behind/at where we need to be in terms of housing stock at the time of writing is in Section 4.4 Historic Estimates of Housing Demand 2011-2019

Essentially they are estimating something they could simply count to get an accurate figure. They are deducing that there has been an implied unmet housing need.

And the accuracy of the estimates are entirely dependant on what base supply position they are using from 2011, a point in time which the data said we were in oversupply and narrative was it would take a generation to soak it up!

In all the discussions about our future housing building requirements I have seen lots of estimates of what might happen in the future and lots of estimates about what has happened in the past.

But I have never seen projections that categorically state this is exactly where we are today in terms of housing capacity, that's our baseline.

If the only solution to the housing crisis we have today is a to build a certain number of new houses how come nobody has ever calculated that number and categorically stated it?

i.e Forget about projections for the next 20 years, irrespective of what might happen in the future this is the figure that we need to build as a matter of urgency asap.