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

The INO were out during the week saying that availability of affordable accommodation was a serious barrier to recruitment of nurses at Kerry general hospital

Now how would he approach solving that. Would he apply controls on airbnb or look for more building and drive some business at his plant hire business

Property tax should be far more than doubled. Its currently 0.1% for the vast majority of homes in the country, and that charged at very underestimated property values for the most people on top. In plenty of other countries (and US states) its 2-3% a year, twenty to thirty times higher.

The only coherent argument against it that I've ever heard is what about cash poor but asset rich people - ie say a retired couple in South Dublin. Which is fair on the face of it. But that can be easily adjusted for by letting people choose to not pay it yearly if they want, they can let it add up (with interest added, set at the inflation rate) as a lien against the property that must be paid whenever it eventually transfers ownership.

The value of all residential property in Ireland is approx €600bn at the moment apparently, so at 2% we'd be looking at say very roughly €12bn a year in additional revenue raised. Imagine using that to reduce PAYE on people actually working - it'd be a much fairer society. We could reduce the PAYE rates by 1/3rd across the board, over night. Or reduce VAT by 2/3rds. Or fund services more. So many options.

Plus all the other positive externalities of having people trade down to more appropriate property sizes, a reduction in overall property prices, reduced demand from foreign investors etc.

It appears my figure was too low as the number and proportion of one off houses is growing substantially

"Fund services"......

WFH means that people may have built on family land in the country. Even if they decided in 2020/21 to do so we would only be seeing it today as the whole design and getting planning permission is a slow process. Who knows maybe because of the housing crisis planning permission is getting easier as it increases the no of houses built in the stats

one thing for sure is getting planning for one of houses in Ireland is normally anything but easy and requires years of jumping through hoops to get approval.

And after that try to get a mortgage sorted. My son is doing a self build he is nearly 4 months trying to get a mortgage sorted. Hopefully in the next 10-14 days it will be sorted.

One thing forget about CU being of any use at present

1585e "cost rental" for a 2 bed in leixlip. jesus wept

True. I guess we have the golden opportunity to reform the civil service 15 years ago, and it was squandered. Oh well....let's print more money.

AI came up in the recent pay deal with the unions seeking assurances that new tech would not result in job losses.

In my opinion the unions missed a trick and should have asked the government to use AI to automate payroll in the public service.

The complexity would have crashed and killed AI in its infancy

Terminator 2 Irish style

I think we should have council taxes like in the UK. The resident, person who is benefiting from the services pays the council tax.

Property taxes drive down property prices also - as the recurring tax needs to be factored into cost of ownership. So that 3% tax costing 3k per annum very quickly drops to 3% tax costing 2k per annum as the property value has dropped instead.

Which is a good thing except for those who end up in negative equity - for everyone else it's a positive. And the fall in prices would not be uniform, more expensive houses would see larger drops which is good news for mover-uppers.

It also massively discourages leaving properties vacant. Its easy enough to not really mentally mind foregoing potential rent, that money is kind of theoretical. But people think twice about keeping a property empty if its costing them a yearly bill of €10-20k out of pocket to do so.

Its got a huge number of positives, particularly in a country with a chronic under supply of housing like ours. It really should be a no brainer to bring in, if we had any sort of honest, non-populist, political parties.

I suspect the no.1 reason people are against property taxes is they have absolutely no faith in corresponding reduction in other taxation materialising.

Yet workers got significant tax cuts over the last few years

I don't know what the effect would be, but the pay deal will be inflationary. If the state wanted to help with inflation, the best way to do it would be to reduce the amount of money in circulation. Cutting civil service pay across the board, or letting superfluous staff go would help in that regard. It will never happen, of course. However, giving out pay rises to hundreds of thousands of people after printing 50+ billion in funny-money is, in my opinion, beyond incompetent. It's criminal.