We are constantly told that the fundamentals are sound, immigration is high, blah blah blah. What I would like to know is how many immigrants are buying houses? Is there anyway we can find this out?
I personally believe that the vast majority of immigrants must be renters as I cannot fathom how they would have sufficient taxed income to qualify for a mortgage.
I am also assuming that their parents are not helping them out and that since the immigration trend is relatively new most will not have been in Ireland saving for a large deposit for the last 5 years.
Finally I read somewhere that there is a 2 year wait for immigrants before banks will lend to them, is this correct?
Don’t know how many immigrants are buying, though at least some with professional jobs are. They were being interviewed on RTE back in the Spring (I only got a second hand report of this) saying that they weren’t planning on settling in Ireland, but that they’d be “foolish” to rent.
Reminds me of a Chinese guy I knew some years ago who bought a narrow selection of Nasdaq stocks in 2000 and told me it was “easy money.” It was, but not for him.
Over dinner, anecdotally the “buying to let vacant” is a lot more common than I realised when I brought it up as another angle to this while sorry state we are in.
Seems its becomming more obvious/known/felt by many.
So I rate that as the largest most distorting factor, PURE speculation, Houses as stocks… history repeats itself and people never learn until it is to late and boy is it too late.
10% of the current population is non-national, the largest nationality being British (291,000). The AIB report from February 2006 sheds some light on the make up and sectors non-nationals work.
The British have the same home owning culture we do, so will probably be the largest immigrant group that buys houses, also if you walk around Dublin city you will see many businesses owned and run by non nationals. While it seems like most of the SPAR’s, Bars, Hotels are dominated by Eastern Europeans and Asians that pay lower wages, increasingly the well paid technical disciplines (doctors, engineering, research and development, programming) are hiring more foreign nationals as the native workforce does not have the skills necessary in sufficient quantity. Also the native workforce has a bias towards construction and the public sector, logically, as this is where the highest wages are.
Irish Mortage Corporation (Hooke & McDonald) claimed almost one-in-five first-time house buyers are non-Irish nationals or 18.5 per cent of first-time buyer mortgages in the first six months of 2006 compared to just 6.2 per cent in the same period five years earlier.
last year was an all time record where by 70,000 people moved here … then 17,500 left, leaving 52,500.
That includes all age groups, can’t remember the exact % (I had posted it on the owl forum) but around 25% (give or take) of that 52.5k are either below 25 or above 45 (so not at what’s termed household forming age).
So basically there’s 40,000 or so imigrants net last year who would be likely buyers… assuming that even a half buy that’s 20,000 units out of the nearly 100,000 completions this year … still less that the number of “investment” properties purchased.
The former obviously and I think that figure wasn’t non-national exactly. It was more a figure of those who hadn’t been resident here for a while and including some Irish returning, again the whole issue about whom is buying, accession versus established member states is rich and varied.
English are obviously the biggest sector of the non-national buyer, I think the more interesting question is what happens in the rental sector if the non-nationals who are keeping demand buoyant in this area where to dry up.
More exposed investors.
Non-nationals who can get into a position to purchase a gaff are generally going to be stable financially, the banks are quite restrictive and downright xenophobic in some instances, so they’ll have to be in good shape to make the various hurdles. I know of some couples where a partner was non-national (accession state), the bank threw up all sorts of barriers despite her job being far more stable, lucrative and marketable all on the basis of her nationality.
Thank you all for your contributions in answering my questions, in summary if we very generously assume Q4 is in line with the first three quarters there will be approx 37,000 FTBs. If we go by Hooke and McDonald figures that 18.5% are non-national that gives approx 6845, which is between 6% and 7% of completions. We can therefore conclude that immigrants do not make up a significant portion of buying demand. Further if there is a net increase of 52,000 non-nationals and nearly 7000 have bought then presumably 45,000 non-nationals must rent. This looks like a significant number yet rents appear to have remained largely static so one would assume that demand has lagged supply until Q3 when there were some rental increases but it remains to be seen if these are caused by demand increasing, supply decreasing or amateur BTL’s believing that rent is set by them.
I suppose a simpler (more fundamental) way of looking at it might be that our population is growing at 11.4 per 1000 yet we are building 24 units per 1000
The average age of an FTB is 32 (according to the lenders). In the age group 22 to 32 (so the next 10 years worth of FTB’s) according to the CSO there are 690,000 souls.
Do the math … that’s the potential pot of ftb … give or take the odd foreign national who manages to make enough for a mortgage.
So with 100k units being built per year that gives ~1m. I would imagine that 30% of this 690k will buy together so based on my back of the envelope calculation we better hope the immigrants buy 500k units…
Whizzbang, I think you might be confusing rent relief with rent allowance?
Rent allowance is where the local authority pays the rent.
Rent relief is a small tax allowance for renters.
crashandburn was referring to immigrants on rent allowance.
)