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

I have just prepared my large family home for sale as I'm downsizing. This involved skips, diy, weeding galore, one new door and never ending scrubbing and cleaning. And lots of expenses! I'm doing it now in my 50's as I know I won't be able for it at retirement age. I also think it is wasteful to be knocking about a big house with big bills when a large family should be living in it. The reason people don't downsize is they don't have it in them to do the work involved when they are older. I realise many also don't do it for nostalgia reasons. I think a motivation could be some kind of 'help to downsize' service as it is truly daunting.

The issue with this is that it has specifically been designed to work, which doesn't match the real world.

What if instead, Paddy and Mary have one small child, while Dinny and Denise have a 22 year old son and a 20 year old daughter?

Dinny and Denise sell their detached house. It is bought by Paddy and Mary. Paddy and Mary's house is bought by Jack and Jill. The 2 apartments are bought by Dinny and Denise (Apartment A) and the 22 year old son (Apartment B). Where does the 20 year old daughter live? It looks like we need a 5th property...

You've also completely omitted that families are getting smaller (so more properties needed to house the same number of people) and that more people are staying single (so it's more likely Jack and Jill remain single and therefore stay living in their separate apartments)

serious trouble in retail property market continue as massive write off for shopping centre values persist

the square for example has seen its value fall from 650m to 250m to 170m to 125m

blanchardstown has also seen its value plummet

who knows what way residential prices will go once migration controls are put in place and real building kicks off

The Square shopping centre goes into receivership, in sign of property market strain

https://m.independent.ie/business/commercial-property/the-square-shopping-centre-goes-into-receivership-in-sign-of-property-market-strain/a908000918.html

Once real building kicks off? And migration control?

When are these going to kick in?

I would counter that most people don't NEED to downsize.

Why would you bother? The mortgage is paid, and let's be honest, if you could afford to live in the house for the past 40 odd years with kids and a mortgage, you can likely afford it when both are gone.

It's your house, full of memories, and likely in decent shape thanks to your hard graft over the decades. Why would you bother moving away from your locality and your friends and familiarity? Why bother putting a house up for sale, and the months of dealing with estate agents, banks, valuers and worst of all, finding and buying a new place, when you could just not do it at all. If you've been in any place for any length of time, services have likely developed around you, so it's probably more convenient than a new build in the middle of an estate.

And as for stairs, get a stairlift.

My point is the idea of "downsizing" is irrelevant unless there is a real cultural desire among the elderly to do it.

In the real world the elderly person likely wants to keep their house so they have spare rooms when the kids and grandkids visit.

Anecdotally, my own grandparents live in a 4 bed house and 3 rooms are unoccupied 95% of the time. They've never once expressed any interest in downsizing. Thinking of my friends, all their grandparents either remain in the family home, or remained there until they passed away, or became unable to care for themselves.

Was chatting about this with my own mum who's in her late 70s. I asked her if she'd be happy to downsize to a hypothetical well-built 2br apartment in a block that was in the same estate (where she's lived for 40 years) - she said absolutely, no hesitation. I think a lot of the resistance to downsizing is just liking the comfort and routine of your own neighbourhood that you've invested decades into. It's a shocker that we don't have these kind of mixed uses in residential estates, such a no-brainer.

The issue with simple scenarios is that they rarely work in complex realities. Nothing about the real world and balancing the needs of millions of people is simple.

Property is Ireland is used inefficiently, that is without doubt, but even if it was utilised in the optimal manner, we would still have supply shortages.
Any expectation of property use being perfectly optimal isn't realistic either. We can and should aim to improve it, but there will never be perfection.

Less than 100 metres from my house, there is a 5-bed house with 6 young professional men living in it. They've converted one of the two living rooms into an extra bedroom.
There's no efficient reallocation of existing supply that sees those 6 young men getting to have their own places, unless there's a family with 4 young kids with each of the six (2 parents, 4 children) living in their own 1-bed apartments (which hardly seems a likely scenario).

With family sizes getting smaller, the natural outcome is that each property will house a lower number of people. Naturally it follows that this means that housing the same number of people requires extra properties (and housing more people requires an even greater increase in total supply of properties).

In previous posts, you've said "So they're to calculate the housing deficit in April 2022, a point in time when they had an accurate figure of a) population, b) habitable housing stock and c) average household size."
The issue with this is if you were to look at population, housing stock and average household size, supply would always appear to be perfectly delivered, because average household size is determined by the population and the housing stock.
The problem is that to identify the number of properties required, you need to divide the population by the number of "family units" (where a family unit is a person or group of persons who want to live in their own household).
Our average household size is higher than it would be if there was adequate supply, as there are a huge number of younger person continuing to live with their parents or in overcrowded rental accommodation specifically because there is not enough supply for them to be able to leave their existing household and start their own.

Lyons has also made good points that much of the housing built in the Tiger was in the wrong places.

I think that accounts for some of his aggressiveness in the targets.

I’d note he hasn’t really brought that up (and that report might not be the best place for it), but I’d also say that WFH culture has given at least a short term reprieve from that (whilst simultaneously driving prices up outside of Dublin).

I went to view one of those a few weeks ago. They are beautiful and a lovely part of Greystones, the right side of town for me and close enough (a lot of the developments out there are too far from town for my tastes).

That’s a massive house to be frank. Bit odd that they are using the 3 bed duplex photos there for that house though.

That said, I struggle with Greystones given the connections. You are really out there once you get out there.

I think it will ultimately hold its value. I agree on the location here vs. other ones in the locality.

If you are someone from Dublin though, you aren’t moving here to be in touching distance. You are just really committed to Greystones (until the day that they really improve DART services), which is fine. Lovely part of the world and a great place to raise a family.

Everyone has different preferences though so I don’t like to criticise. I see so much of that from older folks on social media running down new developments (and the prices!). The vast majority of new builds are a significant step up in quality on what was built even 15 years ago. The amount of older folk going on like they’re old squires of the land when they bought a cookie cutter semi D in 1992.

We took the plunge a few years ago and moved out (with a fair bit of trepidation) having spent most of our adult life in SCD. Couldn’t pay me to move back in to Dublin now. Probably too far out for a 5 day per week office commute to town though.

And here was I hoping we could coax UK builders to come here

Revealing Interview with Michael O Flynn on the Housing Commission report