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

Even with the increased density on each site, the land costs are still far too high.

We need to tackle land speculation, and implement land rezoning taxes - windfall profits from rezoning land from ag to residential should be taxed extremely heavily to discourage land speculation.

Smaller taxes should be levied on residential lands on their market value also, to discourage hoarding. Many towns and cities have just a few developers and businessmen who own majority of development land, and can effectively put the squeeze on anyone looking to build, forcing them to pay eye watering prices for zoned land if they want to build.

Yes, more exemptions than applications of it.

New residential zoned land tax due to come is already seeing local level politicians lobby to add more exemptions, such as for any residential zoned land that is being used for agriculture.

Meaning you could rent out residential zoned land to a farmer and avoid all taxes on that prime development land you own.

Dezoning is fine, but I personally know local councillors (FF) who are pushing for straight up exemptions to the tax.

I think that is where the owner is farmingbit at present

If owner wants to still farm they should object to zoning or apply to dezone, but to have residential zoned land but also pay no tax on it is definition of having your cake and eating it.

We should not facilitate that - residential zoned land should be developed, don't like it? Appeal for dezoning and you won't get benefit of price increase.

Irish regs are very stringent for things like lift cores and the number that must be dual aspect.

Apartment blocks on the continent have far higher ratio of apartments to lift cores, but here it's very low before you need to add another lift core which adds massively to both build price and maintenance costs.

You don't get half as many dual aspects in European cities either as are required in Irish regs - there I think we go overboard.

In Barcelona or Madrid you get far more pisos - flats that are family home sized, 3+, bedrooms all across one floor. Some have no lift cores, others have just one. And blocks themselves are still quite large. And even these are seldom dual aspect. We should really take a lead out of there book - Barcelona is one of the best cities for density without going proper high rise throughout

The land cost is determined by

The amount of units you can squeeze into it, the grants and incentives available to buyers, the tax incentives available to the financier/owner(s), the sudden abolition of charges for essential services.

All these incentives are absorbed and lead to higher land prices, a new wheeze has to be invented to stimulate new supply in higher land price environment so we are forever in a loop of, the more money we throw at it the less output is delivered.

In a booming high wage economy, there is no reason why property can not be capable of washing it's own face and contributing taxes to at least cover the cost of services required for it to exist

You posted earlier this week about how the output is going to outpace every other country earlier in the week. Look at the incentives, grants and removal of charges that has been introduced. What will this do to price, land costs and the next iteration of supply

Development levies and water connection charges gone (26k per unit)

Vacant property refurbishment grant (50k for vacant, 70k for derelict). No effective corresponding taxes to prevent both issues

150,000 grant per apartment for "cost rental apartments" with a target of 6,000 apartments under such a scheme

Remember council are buying social and affordable new apartments at close to 3 times the private market price of a well located similar property.In my district

The scheme is similar to the Crói Cónaithe Cities scheme, where developers get up to €120,000 per apartment in Dublin and up to €144,000 per apartment outside of the capital to build flats

Thanks posting that doc on the ftb grant drawdowns. An eye opener of a document

If you hear anyone repeating the lie about how units cannot be delivered for less than X, have a look for listings of development land and see the prices being paid for it.

Land is inelastic. The amount of it available does not depend on the current price. Well at least it is inelastic at development prices.

Development land does not have any viable alternative competition for its use. What I mean by that is, say a developer tries to pay their labourers only minimum wage, then the labourers will/can go and get a higher paying job in a factory etc. If a developer does not want to pay the price for timber, it can go to other uses rather than construction. But the alternative to a field being used for development is for it to be used for agriculture. It might produce a couple of hundred Euro an acre per year at best. It might be valued at 20k an acre as agricultural (itself divorced from it's production value but that is another matter). Once it is designated for development, whether it sells for 1m or 2m or 10m per acre is purely due to what buyers will pay for it.

So, given all the above, when two or more developers want to build houses, they know what they can sell them for, they know the cost of construction etc. and the variable bit is what they choose to bid for that acre. They bid, say, a million quid. They only do that because they can still make money at that. The actual construction costs are largely irrelevant to the final cost as long as the site cost is relatively high.

Shark mx we moved into an horrific doer upper. Almost all the tradespeople asked us to move out while they worked, eh no, we had nowhere to go. The sellers were shocked we were moving in.

Sometimes you do what you have to do.

F!ck them. Good luck with your project.

When we were buying we were only looking at houses over 30 years old. Too scared to buy anything built in the last 3 decades. I wonder what defects are going to show up with the materials they are using nowadays to build houses and apartments. Lots I think. Sure everyone responsible has all gotten away with it, so why would anything change?

New builds are a roll of the dice and have been for a few years now.

Nope. I know people from all sorts of backgrounds, races, religions, social classes. Most people do. The only thing that seems to separate opinions on what someone should be prepared to move into seems to be age.

No surprises here but Dublin is 4th most expensive in Europe to build apartments at a cost of 3500 per sqm

More expensive than Berlin, than Paris and many more

Insane considering the relatively low population of Dublin and existing very low density

House price inflation approaching double digits, particularly in demand pinch points.

Posters commented how much of a disaster it would be if property prices fell sharply, we should be viewing sharp rises equally as bad

What goes up........

There was some low to negative months in H1 2023 that has been keeping annual rate down. As the drop out of the annual it prob makes it seem like big surge. The annual rate might normalize in next few months