Leo Varadkar warns against increasing housing supply ‘too quickly’

There's many obvious reason the party of landlords and property developers doesn't want housing supply to increase too quickly.

Unless you're a renter or stuck at home because there's nowhere to rent or buy that is! (and yes, they vote too!)

Grand if you're already a home owner who's pulled the ladder up after you, a landlord or investment firm, a builder, or entity renting property back to the State.

Ah Leo Varadkar.. Truly the gift that keeps on giving! Not really a surprise though.. He was in Government when Noonan and Enda signed off on the sell off of huge amounts of Irish property and owed debt for a song to wealthy investment funds who then won again by renting the same property back to the State and those who can likewise afford the exorbitant rents!

Can't be upsetting those groups. Feck the people who need a home!

Then less properties would be built making the problem worse.

Leo has a point unless you want more compensation being paid out by the government for badly designed and/or built property.

The real issue is they did away with the building bylaw inspections and put the decision to a person paid by the builder to confirm it was built correctly. Back in the day if a wall was built without inspection it could and would be ordered to come down and built with inspection. Now the surveyor can't make their client take down the wall and if they don't sign off they are fired

Leo thinks the world revolves around him. He can't or won't fix the problems in THIS country. He doesn't have any dependents. It's just a big game for him, where he is the star in his own head. He has no idea what people and their families are going through.

He knows clearly what’s going on and to think different or that he doesn’t give a crap is nonsense.

It’s common knowledge that Leo and the government wants house prices to remain high to avoid people going into negative equity and to build wealth in the country.

If house prices drop to quick it could be an another disaster for this country.

There building 20k short of what is actually needed to try and keep people happy but everyone knows why there doing it.

The help to buy scheme and first home scheme is too keep the pricing of housing at large.

Their job is to develop wealth in the country not land people in negative equity and they know well their sarcrificing a generation of people to do this, mainly 25-45 year olds

Big on sound bites and grandstanding and paying lip service to problems….

politicians are judged on what they DO… Leo has done very little to help or improve the lives of ordinary Irish citizens…. The majority of us were no better off in any way from his time as Taoiseach….

he has great luck that great masses of his constituency all be not all..but a lot of it would be outside what would be know as traditional working class areas…. Castleknock, Ongar, Carpenterstown etc…. And the decisions being made or enabled won’t bite upper middle class Ireland as hard as it will and are for the rest of us….

you can’t facilitate hundreds of thousands of people coming here and still provide adequate housing to irish people…

” a challenge “ in Leo’s disingenuous lexicon…

“ a disaster “ in our own more truthful upfront explanation.

SF will be loving these comments.

and that 66% of voters are homeowners which is their primary wealth asset. Hence the Govt plays to their tune.

Have Leo and MLM been spending time together lately? Both of them have come out with some very strange comments on the topic of housing.

...again, thankfully another credit fueled bubble is simply not possible, as we ve implemented more robust regulations into all our financial sector entities including shadow banking, pension and investment funds etc, thankfully none of these entities are now over leveraged, and of course with new personal lending rules, another 08 situation simply cannot occur!

Article is paywalled.

But the essence of what he is saying is true.

People are back hyperventilating again about our housing market.

It wasn't long ago when we were bulldozing estates.

We need to stop the fúcking nonsense and feeding frenzies that come with it.

A lot of people came out of Covid cash rich in a position to buy, certain members of the "property porn press" started stoking again which led to a charge and inflated prices.

Incidental landlords from the Celtic Tiger dumped their properties which were snapped up by this ready to go buyer at pace.

We are now at record amount of housing starts and well on the way to flooding the market again.

WTF are you talking about

If you're gonna try and be edgy, be accurate.

Anyone who actually reads the article will see that he says his concern is we’d ramp up construction too quickly and build quality would suffer, as happened pre-2008

Nothing to do with propping up the market.

But no one ever reads the articles

"Demand suddenly dries up"... i think you'll find that about as likely to happen as Israel and Palestinian living in peace

I don't think that penny drops with homeowners until their kids start to leave and they realise how nuts things are.

I'm 48 and when I was in my mid 20 looking to buy a house around Clonmel/Dungarvan/Clonmel there was endless choice.

Now in the Clonmel area, as an example, there is next to no private housing being built. Two estates in Fethard are entirely or majority council/social and the one 13 house private estate was bought by a one well known wealthy individual. An estate by railway station in Clonmel, 10 houses off Cashel road, and significant proportion of houses in Glenconor are all social or council.

Young couples are now buying old stock in need of major work/sh1ty areas, and they are the lucky one.

It's a long way from free market when public purse one way or other is buying most of the new stock.