Dublin is cheap

The Irish Property Bubble (2006) The Republic of Property
#1

Given that we are now heading for near on a decade of nominal rental price stagnation isn’t it time that Pinsters starting beating the drum about cheap it is to rent in Dublin?

This must be especially true when considered relative to incomes - which are amongst the highest in Europe.

For 2k pm you can get your choice of spanking two bed apartments - in new builds or period buildings - in the best neighbourhoods in the city.

Two grand euro (=£1578 sterling = £364 pw) wouldn’t get you a kick in the hole, let alone a fancy gaff, anywhere in zone 1 in London. Think more like 650pw for something comparable.

It’s this inexorable rent vs. buy logic that will drive the behaviour of the coming generation of FTBs in Ireland.

#2

Aston, are you a troll?
Because, if not, then (with respect, as they say) you are severely deluded.
The reason London is so expensive is because it’s London.
Basic economics says that rents drop as sale prices drop.
So Dublin rents have a long, long way to go down yet.

#3

I would not be inclined to compare with London (its population is almost twice that of the republic). How do rents in Dublin compare with simliar population sized cities in the Eurozone and UK?

citypopulation.de/Europe.html

Also I reckon the driver for rents over the next few years will be the availabilty of employment in an area and the budget people have left over after payments for other essential items (including higher taxes).

#4

Quick search on Rightmove.co.uk for Central London (pop. 7.5m):

Cleveland Street, London, W1T £450 pw 2 bedroom flat - Nearest stations:
(0.1 miles) Great Portland Street
(0.2 miles) Warren Street
(0.2 miles) Regent’s Park

Banner Street, London, £450 pw 2 bedroom property - Nearest stations:
(0.2 miles) Shoreditch
(0.3 miles) Barbican
(0.4 miles) Old Street

Margery Street, London, WC1X £460 pw 2 bedroom apartment - Nearest stations:
(0.3 miles) Pimlico
(0.6 miles) Victoria
(0.8 miles) Vauxhall

Wharton Street, Farringdon, WC1X £460 pw 2 bedroom flat - Nearest stations:
(0.3 miles) Kings Cross Thameslink
(0.5 miles) Angel
(0.5 miles) King’s Cross St. Pancras

Devonshire Street, Marylebone, W1G £460 pw 2 bedroom flat - Nearest stations:
(0.3 miles) Regent’s Park
(0.3 miles) Baker Street
(0.4 miles) Great Portland Street

Marchmont Street, London, WC1N £460 pw 3 bedroom flat - Nearest stations:
(0.1 miles) Russell Square
(0.4 miles) St. Pancras
(0.4 miles) King’s Cross St. Pancras

Campbell House Pimlico, London SW1V £460 pw 3 bedroom flat - Nearest stations:
(0.3 miles) Pimlico
(0.6 miles) Victoria
(0.8 miles) Vauxhall

#5

Not a troll Inisman.

Obviously choosing Zone 1 London as a point of comparison is provocative - incomes there (here) are substantially ahead of those even in a wealthy city like Dublin.

The point is that rents in Dublin have not run up in parallel with property prices. In inflation adjusted terms they have fallen considerably. In income adjusted terms they have fallen even further.

It is far from axiomatic that rents will fall with prices. The fact that they didn’t rise with prices should be enough to prove that.

Green Bear gets my point - my question rather - how do income / rent ratios in Dublin compare with other European capitals? Ignore size of the city - it’s income levels that count. Anyone have the data to do an analysis?

I would expect Ireland’s

  • relatively weak tenant protection legislation,
  • buy-to-let boom of the past 10 years (read: oversupply of rented accommodation)
  • supposed cultural affinity for home ownership

to mean relatively low rent-to-income levels in Dublin. Thoughts welcome – ill informed snipping less so.

#6

Over 10% of Dublin property is empty, its 2% OR 3% in London.

Its the empties stoopid

#7

To be fair all of these flats are either (a) in non-prime areas e.g. an ex-local in Pimlico or (b) extremely small top / floor walk ups e.g. the gaff in Devonshire street.

For prime flats of the sort that are comparable, in relative terms, with a place in Ranelagh or Sandymount or Grand Canal Dock think these places

£650 pw
2 bedroom flat to rent
Westbourne Grove Notting Hill, London W11

rightmove.co.uk/viewdetails- … &tr_t=rent

£650 pw
2 bedroom flat to rent
Pembridge Villas Notting Hill, London W11

rightmove.co.uk/viewdetails- … &tr_t=rent

£680 pw
2 bedroom flat to rent
Devonshire Street, London, W1G

rightmove.co.uk/viewdetails- … &tr_t=rent

£650
2 bedroom flat to rent
Tottenham Street, London W1T

rightmove.co.uk/viewdetails- … &tr_t=rent

#8

I earn about half what I used to earn and could now earn in London. Compare with Manchester, Liverpool or Birmingham. That is more like for like.

#9

Oh - I didn’t realise there was a certain standard. I thought the bar was set at something better than “a kick in the hole”.

#10

Spot the odd one out

New York
London
Tokyo
Dublin
Paris
Berlin

#11

Dublin is still not cheaper what has been identified is a trend towards falling rents. With the double whammy of inflation band massive oversupply. The rental story is approximately 1 year behind the very well exposed sales market. Despite there being hundreds of thousands of people engaged in the rental market there is an even greater lack of insight and exposure to this area of Irish society.

However over the next six to 12 months we are going to see an awful lot more stories in relation to landlords experiences. this is the flipside of the this is now the down.

I am currently in discussion with one student union in one large third level College to prepare them with the correct information so as new students looking for accommodation do not go into the market with the same old preconceptions that there is a lack of supply and that rents are high. If I have time a lot I will try to contact the larger body responsible the student unions of Ireland.

I feel that the students starting the next academic term in the coming months will be the first troops in the beachhead of the initial assault on the national psyche perception of the Irish rental market.

This is the beginning of the end of house sharing.

property owners and landlords would be best advised to treat their customers are humility and respect.

#12

NYC has sorted out its dog shit problem.

#13

Well, someone earning €100k (e.g. associate solicitor, senior accountant, GP doctor) will have a take home pay of €5,500.[1]

Someone earing €50k (e.g. IT specialist, engineer bank manager) will have a take home pay of €3,150.[2]

Someone earning €34k (e.g. young teacher, middle management) will have a take home of €2423.[3]

Someone earing €25k (e.g. someone starting off in a graduate job) will have a take home of €1910.[4]

Someone earing €19k (e.g. unskilled schoolleaver) will earn €1530.[5]

Approx 67% of people earn less than 34k.

So on the basis that someone living within their means on a sensible budget will spend 1/3 of their take home pay on accomodation (rent, utilities, charges, decorating for a renter), the above categories of people should spend the following on accomodation:

[1] €1833
[2] €1050
[3] €807
[4] €636
[5] €510

Allowing €50-150 (in increments of 25) per month for utilities and charges and nil-1200 p.a. (taking it that only top end renters i.e. [1] and [2] will spend this] for decorating (most renters IMO don’t redecorate significantly), these figures should be reduced to:

[1] €1583 (less €150 & €100)
[2] €875 (less €125 & €50)
[3] €707 (less €100)
[4] €561 (less €75)
[5] €460 (less €50)

Next, what are the typical expectations of the above categories? I would say that:

[1] top end professional wants a decent house in a good area or a slick city centre pad)
[2] high end professional wants a good house in a good area or a good 2 bed apartments in the city centre
[3] a young professional wants somewhere of their own but of an alright standard.
[4] a young skilled worker wants something basic but not shared or good but shared
[5] a young unskilled worker wants somewhere shared and preferably in a nice area.

I think that of the above no [5] has a good chance of getting their own room in a good house in a decent area for €460 or less.

However, I think the other categories of people will be struggling to get what they want at the price they are prepared to pay. Put another way, if I was a top end professional, I should be prepared to spend no more than €1583 in rent. If that is what a top earner should be expected to pay, and a lot of landlords think that normal 1 bed apartments should be renting for this much ([=1&limit=10&id=591049]for e.g.](Property to Rent in Ireland | Daft.ie[cc_id)) then I certainly think that rents are far higher than wages on a relative level.

If anyone would care to correct or amend my figures please do so.

#14

Stop being so faeces now…

I’ll get my coat.

#15

**whizzbang wrote: **

A) The only (former) head of government never to have had a bank account.

B) All have spent thousands on creating an integrated transport ticketing system, expect Dublin where millions was spent talking about one/

#16

Johnny’s post should be shown to every bull in this market.

Dublin rents are too expensive and as OW exclaimed, it’s gonna be the beginning of the end of the house sharing market as rents come back into line proportionately to income levels.

#17

London rental yields are not that great either nowadays, especially in the prime zone1 areas, with rents only rising about 50% in the last 4-5 years, but the price of property more than doubling in places like Knightsbridge and Kensington. Yes, you can rent out 2 beds in Kensington for 1k£ a week, but they will cost you 1.5mln£. Thats a puny 3.5% yield.

#18

Rents in Dublin are just crazy, and are fed by the entire house-price bubble, and the willingness of Irish people to pay well over the odds for crap.

I lived in Dublin for 5 years back in the early 90s, and even back then Dublin rents were just stupid compared to incomes. When I hear what friends in Dublin are paying each month, I could weep. Utter madness, and yet another symptom of the unhealthy property obsession of the sheeple; and takeover of the State by property VIs since the Taca days in the 1960s.

#19

Dublin, cheap? I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

I think question mark should be added to the thread title. It is clearly a statement founded in rumour.

Obligatory sarcasm indicator here: :wink:

#20

  1. I **don’t **believe Dublin purchase prices are cheap relative to income – all the evidence says that Dublin remains highly expensive on this metric.

  2. However, given that **rental **prices have stagnated for nearly a decade, while real income levels have risen by 50%+ in the same period, it must at the very least be true that it is now substantially cheaper to rent in Dublin than it was in the late nineties.

  3. Johnny’s analysis is superficially reasonably but leads to a counterintuitive conclusion – that someone earning a hundred grand a year can’t ‘afford’ to live in a £2k a month apartment. My thoughts:

a. Is it true that someone on £100k will have a take home pay of £5500 per month? – it’s more like £5900 by my reckoning.

b. Allowing for £1200 pa redecoration in a market where almost all flats are offered furnished feels way too high.

c. No allowance made for sharing or couples except at the lowest income levels.

d. The rule of1/3 of one’s income on residential accommodation works well at low and middle income ranges but with higher incomes becomes redundant – certain expenditures are fixed and don’t vary by income levels - the larger absolute amount allows a high earner to devote a greater percentage to accommodation.

  1. This doesn’t mean that rental prices won’t fall further – five minutes on Daft shows the quantity of supply that has been well flagged on the Pin

  2. But it does mean that in one domain at least Dublin is a lot better served than it was 10 years ago – a much wider variety of rental stock available at much lower prices relative to income.

  3. Comparing Dublin to other European capitals in any debate in Ireland, no matter what the context or question, is usually an opportunity for massive negativity– this has been no exception

  4. I know it’s inimical to the general mode of thought on the Pin but Dublin is a rich city (in income terms at least) and if you live there and make a reasonably attainable salary (say 80-90k) it is possible to rent in excellent, stylish accommodation close to the city centre without breaking the bank.

  5. This fact is going to drive FTB behaviour over the next few years – the marginal FT buyer will hold back from the market until gross yields return to something north of 5-6%.