The CSO is credible in my eyes. I certainly see no reason to disbelieve the figures, although it will be interesting to see if anyone has legitimate criticisms over the next day or two.
Still far more homes need to be built every year of course. Apartments is the big lacuna at the moment. 2k built last year. Needs to be at a minimum 10k per annum to meet demand. Probably closer to 20k over the next decade realistically if the economy keeps growing well.
Comparing sales of new houses in the PPR with the figures there is a pretty good correlation, particularly if you allow for the time lag between completion and sale. The interesting thing is whether we see that 14.4k figure from 2017 come through this year. There were 1960 new homes sold in Q1 (and I think it’s fair to assume that all the figures are in for Q1) compared to 1594 in Q1 last year - that’s only a 20% increase compared to the increase of about 50% in the CSO figures. If you extrapolate to the year (assuming the same pattern of new sales) 9110/1594 * 1960 is 11201 or 23% more. It will be interesting to see how this goes.
Which suggests a lot of unsold houses although the figures suggest a speed up in sales in the last Quarter - not sure if that’s normal. Still waiting to see confirmation in the PPR of a rumour that I heard before Christmas that there were an awful lot of sales closed in Dublin in December (there are about 1500 so far and there were over 2000 last December) - although December figures seem to take longer to come through.
Can someone run up a graph of NCH cost estimations under Simon’s watch (maybe throw in DoH budget overruns as an extra curve) and Housing Completions under Murphy’s watch?
Updating this again. Assuming that the PPR figures are as complete as I think they are there’s seems to be a bigger disparity than previous years when we compare 2017s completions with 2018s new house sales. Perhaps this reflects straight to rent sales which might show as a single sale for multiple units in the PPR. There are certainly a few obvious ones (20 or 30 at a quick glance with between 3 and 36 properties) but that only comes up to about a 1000 at a generous estimate. So there might be a question about whether all these kinds of sales end up in the PPR. There almost certainly a few new properties that haven’t sold - I’ve seen a lot of new infill developments in Dublin that have been slow to sell - mainly because they are overpriced for their size and amenity. I’m not sure if that is more true for new rural property - it was certainly a feature of the tail-end of the last boom
Those numbers are striking. The number of completions has doubled in two years, quadrupled in five. Also from the report, three quarters of them are urban, and 60% in the Dublin + Mid-East region. Meanwhile the number of unfinished housing developments has fallen by three quarters in five years, and almost all those remaining are outside Dublin.
All in all, it seems plausible that – as Ronan Lyons suggested in the Daft housing report – the amount of new supply is starting to catch up to demand and Dublin is soaking up most of it.
At this rate, 2019 will see > 20K. dwellings constructed, approaching a sustainable level assuming current trends in household formation.
Adequate supply combined with no deal Brexit could pop Dublin’s house price bubble unless Gabriel Makhlouf loosens the mortgage rules in defiance of his ECB colleagues. Why else did the government give him the job?