You have to wonder if there is a connection between the number of empty houses discovered by the CSO and the number of properties for sale in these counties. Many of the new homes built outside the Greater Dublin hinterland were probably built in response to speculative demand. The fact that capital growth has ceased and rental demand is weak seems to have lead to a rush of supply hitting the market.
Some might argue that this shows Dublin will be less affected in terms of price falls. On the contrary, I imagine many Dublin based speculators have there hands in many rural property pies and are about to get badly burnt. The for sale figures for this more rural areas are way out of whack.
Somewhere, sometime equilibrium will be restored to the market, as it does its going to hurt
Nearly 40,000 non-holiday homes in Dublin city and county were recorded as vacant in CSO census April '06.
As we all know and some of you who live in apartment blocks, a fair few of these are newly built apartments from the boom.
From personal experience, some apartments in the Gasworks(according to Mrs Gurramok who is a local down in that area of town) and Royal Canal Park are lying idle unfurnished for years.
There are 275,000 - 300,000 empty houses in the country and this equates almost exactly to the number directly employed in the construction industry.I suppose if the worst comes to the worst the builders can always squat in these empty builds, they would actually have the luxury of one person per house
in APRIL 2006 we conducted a census in which 300000 homes out of 1.8m were empty but this was broken down into
275000 permanently empty and holiday homes
25000 temporary absences
300000 total, 1 in 6 precisely .
SINCE April 2006 , over a year ago , we have lost some homes and built a lot more. Lets assume we have had a net gain of builds over retirements of 60000. As the average household is 2.8 persons we would have to have expanded the population by 60000 x 2.8 ( or 168000 persons) to fill these (never mind our existing empties) . We did not do so.
Our population has gone up by 80000 at most.
Therefore we only filled half the new builds and none of the empties on aggregate.
The situation since the census is
Homes
1.8m homes then
1.86m homes NOW
Empties
300000 empties then
330000 empties now
empties as % of total housing stock in May 2007 including ‘temporarily’ absents
Also factor in the new build estates that have been mostly bought by “investors”, who let the buildings out to the the South American and Eastern European builders who are building the remainder of the estate.
I’ve yet to meet any of those… How on earth did they get visas??? They can’t be here in any numbers, that AIB Treasury report that did the breakout of construction workers back in 2005 didn’t report any statistically significant number in that regard.
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