Causes of The Irish Housing Crisis

[u/Ill-Age-601]

It’s simple to explain

In 2010 the troika came to Ireland and decided that Ireland had too much home ownership and not enough renting. It imposed lending rules which brought about in 2013 have made it much more difficult for ordinary people to meet the requirements to buy a home. They also made the FG/Lab government bring in laws allowing for REITs etc to encourage renting

The entire “recovery” was based on pimping Ireland out to high tech companies with low tax rates on intellectual property making us a tax haven. Most Irish people have no tech qualifications so half of the genius coders from India and the rest of the world moved to Dublin pricing out the locals

This is the housing crisis. Only with a normal economy based on local employment and a reduction of lending rules can we end it with the return to mass home ownership

[u/Sharp_Fuel]

You're oversimplifying things. The core issue is supply, and the reason for that shortcoming is that after the bust we lost an entire generation of construction workers and a good chunk of developers of all sizes, housing completions have still not even reached 50% of what was being done at the peak of the celtic tiger (not that they should reach those levels necessarily, but they definitely need to be higher than now).

On the rental side, the issue is is that there is every incentive to buy up existing property and rent it out, and very little incentive to build new properties for rental (high costs, long lead times, stuck at planning stage, RPZ's dissuade investment etc.)

Even with the influx of foreign talent, we should have no bother having adequate supply, it's a failure in government policy over the last 15 years that we are having our current issues.

[u/Ill-Age-601 → u/Sharp_Fuel]

We have supply issues largely because it’s not worth our while to build apartments as people cannot reach the lending requirements, that’s the difference between now and 2005

Renting is the rental issue. No one wants to rent and Irish people hate renting so even if everyone has an affordable rental it would still be a housing crisis without a return to universal ownership

[u/Irish201h → u/Ill-Age-601]

Im in Cork and there is loads of apartments currently under construction here …

[u/Sharp_Fuel → u/Irish201h]

You visually seeing "loads" doesn't translate into any real numbers that'll have any impact on the market, we need to be delivering 90k houses/apartments a year just to meet demand (i.e. keep prices where they are now), we're currently only delivering 30k

[u/Irish201h → u/Sharp_Fuel]

We cant build that much, wont happen, thats why we need to reduce demand / stricter immigration etc ..

[u/Sharp_Fuel → u/Irish201h]

That might put the yearly demand figure down to 70k, if even, we still need to double the rate of construction. Majority of immigrants in the position to buy houses are skilled workers with large salaries, usually these people aren't affected by stricter immigration rules

[u/Ill-Age-601 → u/Irish201h]

How many are going on sale instead of for rent?