I don’t suppose it is beginning to occur to the chumps in charge that the property market may not re-start for a long time yet because without any semblance of transparency, people will not risk their financial well-being on the press releases of vested interests. It’s time for a proper public record of housing transactions.
on the number of empties:
if you think there is more than that stated -where are they coming from? If it is something that can be proved then lets find out the true answer and get it published, that is the single best way to counter CIF or any other figures, to challenge it with factual information.
I’d be interested in delving into this too.
I know of lots of places with estates full of idle empties.
Only a couple of them ever seem to be advertised for sale or for rent on the web.
Apart from the ones For Sale on Daft, myhome and countable.
How many of the unaccounted for empties:
- For Sale or Rent, but not advertised through conventional means i.e. daft.ie, myhome.ie.
- In limbo/In dispute/Repossessed/Owned by the bank/Unfinished
- Holiday Homes (Costa Del Leitrim is the new Monaco after all)
- Investment properties where the owner isn’t bothered about it lying idle (yet)
Jesus CIF are pumping this story hard. A little too Hard.
funny but my first reaction to this headline is that there is not 9 billion worth of houses sitting empty.
If they arent making money directly by renting, or functioning by having people live in them, or even to use the recent past making their owners money by capital appreciation, then they arent worth 9Billion…
lets take a 7% return on investment, 9,000,000,000 should be providing 630,000,000 rental income to various landlords etc…
The CIF realise fully that 90% of empties are held by private individuals and 10% ( 35,000) are held by Country Toms members .
Anyone remember when Matt Cooper mentioned the census figure for empties on Q and A back in January ( Q4 ) and Country Tom jumped in and cut right across him to stop him developing the point . We discussed it here at the time .
Yo!!! Tom .
It’s The Empties Stoopid
Yeah. It’s the elephant in the corner. I gave it between the eyes to a particularly obnoxious taxi driver recently and he nearly crashed the cab in shock. The 30,000 figure, which has grown by 50% in the space of a few weeks is an article of faith. People are not yet ready to comprehend ten times that figure.
Its like that adage about putting a frog into cold water & slowly bringing it to the boil so they don’t jump out.
None of the VIs, including the Government wants the real empties figure becoming common knowledge too soon, it hinders the bailout.
Oh Aye, 9bn worth of empties today, but don’t worry all, I predict there will only be 4.5bn worth of empties this time next year 
Tom must be delighted, he has a huge range of investment properties to choose from. How’s the search going Tom?
Remember the Q&A episode too well, a good point in media relations for those wishing to conceal the facts.
The ponzi people of ireland are about to see who the government bails out, hint it aint canny mcSavvy, FF thanks them for thir support though. as long as CIF shift their lot its OK with them, the govt and the banks.
It’ll be converted back to farmland, and Tom will rejoin the IFA telling people there’s tremendous value in beef and grains.
how do we get accurate figures then? how do you challenge conventional wisdom if we don’t have the tools with which to take it apart?
we need to make a list
- where are the new build empties and how do you accurately count them
- where are the non-new build and how do we get an accurate number on them?
if we can get true figures and our homework correctly then it will get into the mainstream but it has to be figures beyond reproach.
We cannot get them is the answer. Do you agree with the 350k empties figure (including holiday homes) by the way ??
I don’t agree any figure I don’t understand, I heard a person today say that in one regional town there are 451 unsold new builds but another source said it was 1,100 the person saying 451 had actually gone to the bother of walking the streets taking a count and then also talking to all of the local developers so on one hand the empties for some areas are over stated and for others they are grossly understated.
the truth is that if we have no way of trying to put a method on the count then the CIF could say its 10, 10,000, or 100,000 and nobody has the tools to counter it with.
so all that tells you is this: a method or a responsible and accurate measure of coming up with the figure is required. Thus far there is none and no ideas either it seems! A market that cannot be accurately interpreted actually scares me more than one that is in trouble with correct information available, at least in the latter you can make judgements based on reliable information, in the prior you don’t even know what you are dealing with.
350,000 it is so , until proven otherwise.!
In the budget an empties tax was announced whereby every local authority in the country is incentivised to count ‘their’ empties and will then tax them @ €200 per unit, mainly for being empty . The empties tax shall include holiday homes.
The various 2009 Budgets for our local authorities will be published over the next 4 weeks. I shall analyse a sample over the next month.
We will have good guesstimates from some of these local authorities in the early part of the new year as they (still) haggle over their budgets and we will finally have some hard facts by about this time next year.
*Some ‘developer and auctioneer led’ local authorities will , as you know, attempt to lowball the empties to keep their central revenue up in the mini budget next spring . There shall be discrepancies *
Eventually it will all settle down towards the end of the year next year.
What’s wrong with the census - 250k empties in 2006, was it? That’s 7-8 times what the CIF claims now? Where did all these empties go? Where did all the subsequent new-builds go? Does roughly every 5th couple in the country own a holiday home???
Surely that’s enough in itself to debunk this 35k nonsense.
Although I’ve just noticed that Tom is talking about 35k new-builds - I’d take that to mean developers current stock only.
even accepting the CIF figures of 35000 empty new builds
In america they have 350,000 empty new builds and regard it as an economic catastrophe in terms of the overstock of newly built houses.
America has 305 million people. so our empty new builds is 10 times as bad as that in the states which is having it’s greatest construction catastrophe ever.
lets face it
we need a sum total of 0 new houses for the next 5 years
how about a ban on all new development
Fixed that for ya 