Selling to the council

My rental apartment went on the Market recently and the council came in with an offer 10% higher than the other bids.

Estate agent advised me to leave it another while as he said the council will bid again probably another 10% over that again.

Had another bid €1000 euros over the councils bid and now today council have bid 15% over that bid again.

I think im going to accept it. Its 35% over the original asking price at this point.

I dont know what the process is after accepting the bid but if i find out they normally take more than 2 months max to close then i'll pull the plug on their bid. Im not interested in the slow wheels of bureaucracy.

I accepted. I'll be glad when its gone. Even though I was making a profit on the rental it is a mugs game now and the risk is significant of it all going pear shaped. Glad to be out of it tbh.

It's called tenant in situ . Big push on for councils to step in and buy in these situations.

Might get a bigger push post budget next week.

The councils are only doing as ordered by the government, and more specifically the minister for housing who is giving them the terms and budget to do this

Council bidding against itself lol,all you need to is wait for a little while after refusing the first bid, or get somebody to make a fake bid and then they come in again with another bid.

Couldn't make this stuff up, the sheer incompetence and waste of public funds.

Traditionally, those who were of modest means would have availed themselves of humble council accommodation at an affordable rent, while the better off would have bought privately in order to live in a larger house, among other better off people.

But these sky high rents and prices in the private market also mean a greater need for council accommodation for lower paid workers. Would you not agree that, for example, a childcare assistant living and working in Dublin should have at the very minimum an own-door studio apartment at a rent they can afford? Yet looking at prices on Daft, their take home pay would not cover it even if all their money was given over to rent with nothing left over for food etc. This is why council accommodation is needed now more than ever.

You can see however that the number 1,500 is not really sufficient to have a major upward effect on prices.

I'm also of the view that large numbers of small private landlords are not good in terms of building a long-term secure rental sector. So this purchase scheme is a way of helping them out of the market.

OK you say that land banks held by government authorities should be used to build housing. Yes, but would not the same objections occur here if that land is used exclusively for social housing? What about the FTB, it might be argued, should the government not sell that land to the private sector so that FTBs get a chance to buy housing on it? And then what happens when those land banks are used up?

On the other point, yes, possibly some administrative fees could be saved though I don't think planning would be eased significantly. The same process would have to be gone through.

When we talk about councils building homes, I think it is unlikely that we will return to the days when councils employed directly brickies and the like to build houses. But if they did, there would be upward pressure on wages which would affect costs in the private sector too.

More likely it will be private companies contracted to build estates employing subcontractors and the like. While possibly more cost-effective, profits would have to be made by those companies just like if they are operating in the open market.

But then, of course, you have the FTB crowd whinging (understandably in fairness) that that land should be sold so that private developers can build on it and sell to them.

Ultimately every council house built is at the expense of a potential FTB purchase, just like if the council buys directly off the open market.

While this may have some upward effect on house prices, it is needed in order that low paid workers are also housed.

I think what you are forgetting is opportunity cost.

All building of council homes, however, means diverting resources away from the private sector and ultimately properties being available to FTBs and other private purchasers.

Let us say a council owns a site worth 20 million on the open market near the centre of a city. They could sell this land to developers and use the money to buy properties elsewhere, perhaps further out from the city centre. This might be better value all around than the council building directly on that land. The same number of units end up getting built but FTBs get to purchase closer in to the city centre in the new privately built units.

I agree that councils should not be sitting on land banks but directly building on them for council houses may not be the best use of that land.