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

Remember how important airbnbs are to the local economy now so many hotel rooms are filled with homeless and IPAs.

We don't need it to be indefinitely sustainable but we do need a massive increase in building, preferably more than double over the next decade to make up the shortfall.

As I said if you didn't own your own home and were looking to purchase one your viewpoint would be drastically different.

If we start off with 18,000 Air BnB properties.

Let’s say half of them are exclusively for the purpose of Air BnB and not rent a room / actually short term in nature.

The let’s consider that a lot of them are actually holiday homes, ie they are in the same places that people don’t want to live in full time.

Ronan Lyons did a piece on this during Covid. We had a clear instance of these leaving the Air BnB market and coming back to the rental market. It made very little difference.

I do get that the little things add up but this gets a ridiculous amount of air time. When someone mentioned the opposite from silver bullet solutions ie that rent pressure zones has people holding back supply from the market, this is either denied by the same people who drone on about Air BnB or they just default to a “**** landlords, seize the property” mindset. It isn’t serious.

Well we do. The most successful countries are the ones who have consistent supply of units across all elements of housing. That consistent supply from my review is about 4 to 5 a year per 1,000.

I don’t deny we will need to increase to 50k over the next few years, and possibly 60k+ by the end of the decade.

To be clear though, if our population is at say 6m by the end of this decade (which would be a very high number blowing through even more up to date estimates), a 66k output would be 11 per 1,000. That would be extraordinary and dwarf anything in Europe.

It is very easy to ignore the impact of retrofitting too.

I personally think a 6 to 7 per 1,000 consistent target of supply would be a better and more sustainable target. That is not to say we shouldn’t overshoot that- as the Housing Commission notes, our “plans” are often more restrictive in nature than helpful.

So when I say we need to double or treble the builds you say "I get that, but it isn’t sustainable" then when I say we don't need them to double or treble it indefinitely you say "Well we do" Do we or don't we need to?

We need it to be at 60k now not by the end of the decade!

It's fantastic that you as a homeowner think that 6 to 7 per 1000 is sufficient, leaving us looking to buy a property locked in constant bidding wars and keeping the value of your home at a record high.

It's fairley emotive for a lot people when it feels as if the system isn't working for you, despite you doing all the right things.

People are right to feel annoyed about how housing policy is impacting their lives.

But that’s down to the people whipping that up. Same goes for migration.

The frustrating thing in Ireland is that we have these short term bursts of emotive anger and it often leads to sub optimal policy making.

Rents go up a crazy degree- demands for rent controls. We then react and bring in these controls in a long term manner that is bad for housing.

This is also evidence with historic debates around hotels and now office building. The thing right now is a demand to stop new office construction because there is slackening demand. This is reactionary and is demanding state intervention when none is needed. Worse, when demand picks back up, we could have stupid regulations in place that stop the market getting going again. And people call this “leaving it to the market”.

We also saw this with the “no family homes” lark when developments came back with studios, 1 and 2 bedroom apartments. This is despite us having definitive data that we have an abundance of 3+ bed types of homes and not enough 1 and 2 beds! Councils now have stupid regulations in place that limit what capital can do, and it isn’t based on data and more on feelings.

Air BnB should be regulated and limited for sure. But it should be on planning grounds. And we need to be clear that the impact is limited.

1. I'll repeat so, since you seem to be desperately trying to avoid admitting you have no actual figures: so thats a "I have no evidence" for your claim so? You've provided zero sources for exactly what % of the "sigificant amount" of funding you're claiming was paid for by religious orders. Talking about general increases in state education funding is not evidence of religious funding in any way, its peak whataboutery.

2.

"The new figures show Fine Gael-led governments spent €3.2bn on
Rent Supplement, €1.8bn on the Rental Accommodation Scheme (RAS),
€3.5bn on the Housing Assistance Payment (HAP) and €900m on long-term
leasing schemes. The total figures across all these taxpayer-funded
schemes amount to €9,583,731,000" [1]

€3.5bn spent specifically on HAP. Close to €10bn on rental supplements overall, a complete waste of tax payer euros that just serves to drive up the price of renting and buying houses for actual tax payers in the private sector rental market hugely.

So just to clarify, is your argument that you think this €10bn spent is sound government housing policy, and you wish it to continue and expand, the way it has been going?

Or do you think that perhaps all logic would suggest it could have been used to actually build large numbers of social housing, assets that the government would now own long term and would actually serve to reduce rents?

[1] https://m.independent.ie/irish-news/sinn-fein-in-election-attack-over-fine-gaels-10bn-spend-on-landlords/a2003795417.html

We have one of the youngest populations in Europe, one of the worst existing housing deficits, and are projected to see some of the highest population growth in Europe.

Why you feel it's fit to compare our current output to those of our European peers and then exclaim "everythings fine, nothing to see here" I do not know.

We need to be building well in excess of other countries in Europe because none have the same pent up demand or projected forward demand as Ireland does.

So builders have no access to finance and the State has so much they decided to broadcast to the world they were setting up a sovereign wealth fund

Some solutions

Private market

State provide a guarantee they would buy unsold units at a pre determined price a little under market rates, sure beats paying half a million for 1 bed units in Limericks most expensive area

Social and affordable

Fund the developments and reap the gains of developer margin removal, significant difference in cost of finance, removal of risk premium. Looking at a 25 to 30% saving on those 3 alone. Add in the potential of the state building on own land and you have significant savings on the private market price

State saves on current spending policies while likely generating significant income from rental income to allow further investment

More made up twaddle.

What is it with people unable to actually debate and bringing in emotional gibberish to the fray? I’m a renter myself looking to buy, so get off the stage with this BS.

A 100,000 unit shortfall is not “fine”. It is an extraordinary deficit built on years of under supply.

I didn’t say I knew better, I said I disagree with some members and their assumptions. Forecasting is extremely difficult to do, as proven by the consistent underestimates by the ESRI of our population growth for 30 years.

I think it should be noted that one of the outcomes of the report is that we spend the most in Europe but need to improve outcomes. My assessment is that we need to ensure a consistent supply of social and affordable housing along with reducing costs where we can to make it more desirable. The market then must be allowed to “work”. This makes all of our estimates moot as it can respond to peaks and troughs in demand. Personally I think if we had 100,000 extra units now along with our current output that we’d have a far more normalised market. That doesn’t mean every young adult rents a studio, that’s a policy and culture point that we need to grapple with.

AirBNB is already de-facto illegal so don't see any scope for much more stick. As for the carrot that was compost long ago.

"Id like to know how the housing charities are doing collecting their rent too."

That's the bit I don't understand also. If the councils failed at collecting rent, how are charities going to be any different? Is it somehow a different model?

Thanks. So if they have non-paying tenants, they just hit up the government for more money I presume. In that case, wouldn't there be even less incentive to pay rent if you were a tenant of a housing charity? They're not going to inititiate expensive legal proceedings that could last years, when they can just poor mouth the government for more money.

Or am I wrong?

I have explained to how as the religious orders exited tge education sector ( you can add health provision as well) that cost within the sector exploded. You choose to ignore these facts.

Since 1970 education costs have increased from 107 million to virtually 10 billion while general inflation only catered for 1.5 billion of it.

Now as I already explained RS and RAS are specific payment that exist as they are emergency rental payments. RS is for those already in rental accommodation who for circumstances beyond there control fall.on hard times, example a person who gets seriously ill with something like cancer, a mental health issue and needs support with there rent for in the short term. Social housing is not a necessity for them as its a short term issue. Social housing will not be applicable to situations like this.

RAS is a scheme where LA contract accommodation for specific medium term rental support. For instant those on RS can move onto RAS, (example long term illness, moment that have left abusive and violent relationships), I think some Ukranians and other refugees are also accomodated under it.

You heaped both these schemes in with HAP and only now are starting to see the difference. HAP itself which I am defending is a very cheap scheme for the government. It is costing about 9k per tenancy and there are about 65k tenancies. Other schemes have nothing to do with it