Ireland had the second fastest growth of housing stock in Europe

by NanorH

17 comments
  1. How much of that housing stock growth was available to normal workers to buy though. If you take out all the ones the councils, charities, REITs get before the normal worker gets a look in that’s a whole different picture.

  2. This hides the truth that the vast majority of housing stock is either bought by the government for social housing or sold to huge international rental companies. The remained are hugely overpriced, inflated by the designed scarcity (increasing demand) and the insufficient supply (for reasons above). Houses near my workplace are going for about 550k+ for a 3/4 bed. The vast vast majority of these went to social housing though.

    This is 40/45 mins from Dublin, in Co. Kildare

  3. This doesn’t really tell us much as it is relative to our current housing stock. Better to look at houses per capita, of which we are very very low in, much lower than the OECD average, and behind all of the countries on this list apart from Poland.

    Worth checking out the OECD hm1.1 report on housing stock and construction. I can’t link it here because Google just gives a direct download to the PDF, but if you search “housing stock per capita per country” it is one of the first results. The first figure shows dwellings per 1000 inhabitants across OECD countries.

    We have just over 400 houses per 1000 inhabitants. Italy has 600 with France not far behind. Spain, Austria, Germany are all over 500.

    The issue with the statistic in this thread is that if you have a much lower housing stock, the percentage built will be higher all else equal. If we only had one house and built a second, that’s a 100% increase, but then if we built another the year after that’s only a 50% increase.

  4. Problem is, none of the new housing is affordable. Dublin commuter town new homes see close to half a million for a 3bed terraced, or sometimes a two bed. Who can afford these prices?

  5. Which is a good start, but we need to push even higher. Our rate shouldn’t be within an order of magnitude of countries woth stagnant or declining populations.

  6. It’s even more impressive that poland has this rate of stock increase for years, while Ireland started very recently. 

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