"average Dublin house prices should fall to ‘the €300,000 mark" according to Many Lou McD.

The stats on that page are eye opening, what we have been spending on HAP 😮

This is why naively putting more taxpayers money into the pockets of landlords or giving them tax incentives won't work. We've been throwing money at them for years and things have only gotten worse.

Planning delays are a very real thing that kill off viable projects and the government have had a few goes at speeding things up by effectively allowing large developers to bypass local authorities (admitting by extension they are a roadblock) but they have rolled back on that again now with all the who-ha in an Bord Pleanala - there is no good answer because if you try to speed up the process too much you will piss off the local communities who voted you in.

It would have made sense to give the LDA the ability to go use the Part 8 planning process to move things along but even the small allowance in their powers to push past local authority roadblocks holding up usage of key sites was met with uproar in the Dail and Seanad that local councillors were being ignored - you really cant win unless you want to go back to the good old Celtic Tiger days of brown envelope planning approvals which would be very ironic for SF the end up there instead of FF or FG!

LL pay 50% tax on rents. You would be surprised the amount of people who are unaware of this. So if you have a 1k mortgage on a property you need 2k rent to cover it.

The 50% tax is going back into the government purses

If been a LL was so easy why are they all leaving the market?

How are the current government "beholden to landlords and the like"? any of the changes that tenants have demanded have been implemented. This has meant LL are forced out of the market. If the government was beholden wouldn't they have stopped all the changes?

Maybe you could give us a few example of how you would speed up planning?

Another possibility would be to give An Bord Pleanala more resources so that appeals don't get held up for long periods. If you remember there was a bogus "NGO" that made spurious objections on environmental grounds which they would withdraw if they were paid a lucrative "consultancy" fee. The idea was to object just enough to have the application sent to An Bord Pleanala where it would then languish. A more efficient appeals process would take away the incentive for these groups to operate in this way. But again, there are probably too many who support the current mainstream parties who would lose out if new developments were easier to get going.

The only positive aspect is that at least this money will go into the creation of new units through, as you point out, keeping builders busy. I would prefer to see obstacles removed and the encouragement of inward investment so it is not just the State carrying the can but that will not happen under Sinn Fein or the current parties.

However it is extra state money going towards building new housing over and above what private buyers can afford. So it will have a stimulating effect on building just like if the State were to build directly or contract a builder to build an estate of houses. If you are against social housing you wont like it, true, but that does not detract from fact that public money is directed towards builders building housing.

By inward investment I mean regulated public-private partnerships where outside money, not merely state money is used to build housing with the outside party getting an agreed percentage of rents over a number of years. Like you might have in say, building a bridge, for example.

The idea here is to get large numbers of housing units built relatively quickly while keeping cost to the tax-payer fairly low.

You said LL are making jam, if it was such easy money why don't they stay in the market?

So you now agree LL are not making jam at all? or some of the reason you gave yourself.

A LL from the Tiger would probably have a 20-30 year mortgage at anything between 1-3k per month repayments.

So they would need 2-6k per month rent just to cover the mortgage. That's before a profit.

Unless you have properties without a mortgage then that's why people have left the market, along with the increasing number of tenants who think everyone owes them a living it's easier to sell up and move on.

The days of the Celtic Tiger the laws made it easier to be a LL, not for the last few years when the laws changed as demanded by the tenant, pushing all the risk onto the LL who have next to no comeback if the tenant doesn't pay rent/wreck the place etc

I'm not a LL by the way but I don't listen to the crying of the rental market, they demanded the changes and then when they got implemented cried out the outcome

Agreed LL from Celtic tiger have not, over the period of their investment, made a fortune. But they leveraged up to the max and bought an asset in one of the biggest price bubbles of all time. Of course they didn’t make money. It’s like buying tech stocks just before the dot com bubble and saying that means tech stocks are a bad investment.

But for anyone other than those who bought at the very peak they’ve had almost the perfect decade of massive capital appreciation, massive rental growth, almost 0 vacancy rates, falling finance costs. If they didn’t make money in those conditions then what on earth were they hoping for when they bought? Conditions couldn’t have be more perfect.

As an aside based on your post, unless your mortgage is interest only, ‘covering the mortgage’ is making a profit. Paying down capital = profit.

I think you are wrong in the same way that Sinn Fein is wrong in a fundamental sense. You are not taking into account that new units built and occupied as social housing take away pressure on the private market. The people given social homes are no longer competing in the private market for houses and flats and therefore the overall price comes down there too.

Superficially, you might think you have the opposite view but that is not the case. They object to large upscale private developments based on the same misunderstanding that you have but operating at a different end of the market. They fail to realize that these private developments, even though they don't target the poor, remove pressure at the lower end as the better off are no longer competing with the less well off for the limited available housing.

It is the same basic lack of understanding in both cases.

So you want to tell people who have worked and saved for years that it's ok they can not buy a house but rent one?

Any government that plans to block everyone buying a house to give social housing to others will be rightly thrown out very very quickly.

People spend years in school/college/work etc to get the chance to buy a house and you want to tell them no, you can rent. But all these people sitting on social welfare will be given a free one?

The top PAYE band starts at €42,000, an income which as of 2021 would put one in the 65th percentile for income in Ireland. Even allowing for across the board income increases since then you're looking at circa 40% of the population earning too little to be in that bracket. So yes, including plenty of small scale landlords.

That aside, why should a landlord in the top income bracket's rental income be taxed any different than someone in the top income bracket who takes on a second job and receives an income from that? Or someone who invests in stocks and then pays the same tax on dividend income? They're all additional sources of income and treated as such.

You assumed I wasn't a landlord so I told you I am one. I'm not sure how much more personal situation discussion you need/want.

The mortgage payment is investment in the capital asset. Again, positive monthly cash flow is not a requirement for a massive positive investment return in the Irish property market given the way its developed over past 40 years (and all signs show it will continue to). Which anyone whos actually done the maths on being a landlod could tell you.