@Mark Dit: and people won’t have houses to buy unless we stop allowing vultures to swoop in and turn every property into a buy to rent one.

@Mark Dit: which will never happen because the responsibility dodging government recently postponed the First home scheme because of an uncapped influx of Ukrainian refugees. Help them by all means by don’t forget to help ourselves!

@Liam Edward Harris: but surely even with buy to rent properties it will increase the supply and the natural order will see a decrease in rents as the demand is met.

@Liam Edward Harris: Mass purchasing should be restricted, but the only solution is build more units. Improve regulation of landlords and tenants would help. If more units are built, rents drop also.

@Sean Minihane: a number of things prevent that. For large investment funds speculation is a factor. The value of their property portfolio isn’t necessarily tied to it actually earning any money. Share prices aren’t always reflected by profitability

Secondly,the fewer hands that property is in the easier it is for them to control the supply. You might own 100 properties and rent them out for 2000 a month. Or, you could restrict supply and rent out 90 properties at 2400.

@Dave Johnston: This government has contempt for those struggling to find accommodation. That ‘breaking point’ is likely to be serious civil unrest as the electoral process is not responding to basic needs.

@Sean Minihane: Nope, because the financial funds that are doing buy to rent they’re pushing the average cost of rent up and up. As this happens people can’t save for a mortgage deposit. Too many properties are being built as buy to rent, it’s impossible for normal people (first time buyers) to actually buy.

@Liam Edward Harris: if you believe “The Economist” that is actually the most cost effective way to provide housing. Vultures clean up the carcasses from speading disease. Despite their ugly looks, we’d be worse off without them.

@François Pignon: Depends, does that analysis consider the long term cost of having an ageing population dependent on a volatile rental market? If they can’t pay rent as retirees on a fixed income, who pays for that? “Cost effective” might end up being a euphemism for cheap, which isn’t always good value in the long run.

@Mickey Finn: no better or worse than ours.

@Andrew Giles: Yes and the have-nots are increasing in number and will soon reach a boiling point.

@David Corrigan: for that money if you were renting you’d be entitled to an arm chair :)

@Ríain HenC: Look at your man, able to afford an armchair

@Michael:

Crazy price, not much hope for the new generation tbh

@David Corrigan:
What you living in, a shed?

@billy bound: A 3 bedroom house.

@Michael: Great, that will free up another property! Adios..

@Michael: Emigration of young people is government policy. They really don’t care.

@Bramley Hawthorne: Absolutely, they’ve been told the only way to solve the housing problem is for people to emigrate.

@Sean Minihane: Facts? You’re seriously going to use actual facts to support a comment? Has the Journal lowered itself to that level now?

@Sean Minihane: if we included their spouses how many would be landlords?

@mmz: there’s no free market in property in Ireland. I don’t know why this myth is so pervasive. There’s huge demand for housing and the market has it’s hands tied to solve it. There are regulations on what you can build, where you can build, how you can build, taxes on everything from materials to labour to stamp duty. All of these things push up the cost of land and building. And even then you’ve regulations on what you can borrow and our mortgage rates are among the highest in Europe, and many argue this is due to regulation.
I’m not saying the market would fix this without causing other problems. If we let developers loose they’d throw up any old ugly fire-trap. But the idea that this is a free market issue when the market is so heavily regulated and taxed is just not true.

@Podge: @Podge: I think what people mean by free market in this case is not that a free market is lightly regulated or taxed but rather that an overly optimistic reliance on classic supply and demand doesn’t really work with housing markets.

@Conor Doherty: I think you’re right. It just annoys me that people are complaining about a free market when they actually mean something totally different because free markets have definitions. Then people form incorrect views about free markets. And the reason classic supply and demand isn’t working is because of a failure of government not because the principals of supply and demand don’t work.

@Podge: Well, I think the problem is that the principles of supply and demand as classically stated are an abstraction and a simplified heuristic model rather than a realistic description of how any particular market does or should work. Definitions of what a free market is are necessarily contested and not given in some absolute sense, so I don’t think we can do much more than argue for own perspectives rather than insisting on the purity of our chosen definitions.

@Conor Doherty: It could be argued that at best supply and demand leaves out a lot of the other factors that buyers and sellers respond to in even a simple housing market. The behaviour is often about what we expect other agents to do rather than price alone, for example.

@Conor Doherty: true, they are an abstraction but we can’t make claims like supply and demand don’t work when we’re nowhere near existing in that vacuum. I know we’ll never get to a state where we can isolate the effects of supply and demand on the market. And things do have definitions, we can’t just say we define something differently and end up not being able to talk about something. What we can do is discuss if the definition applies here.

@Conor Doherty: and a free market is defined as “an economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses”. So due to all the restrictions placed on entities operating within the housing market I would argue that we don’t have a free market.

@Podge: I suppose in part people see government inaction and chalk it up to ideology, whereas opportunism, accident and incompetence all have a part to play.
As for definitions, I agree but then there is ultimately no authority who can settle this, we necessarily have to argue, especially where politics come into it.

@Conor Doherty: “Unrestricted competition” can mean many things. In fact, few advocates of the free market at present take that to the libertarian extreme and claim that any regulation or restriction invalidates the claim. If we don’t go for full purity, then we have to argue over where the line is drawn.

@Conor Doherty: that’s very true. And I’d say we would disagree on where we draw the line. My whole point though is that I’m arguing that we don’t have a free market for the reasons stated above and even if I accept a wider definition of what a free market means I wouldn’t attribute all blame to the failure of the principal of supply and demand as I believe regulation failures are the primary cause.

@Podge: I’d say there’s lots of reasons really, external factors and the money supply haven’t helped. It’s also happening in other countries too, so it is unlikely to be unique to our government.

@Podge: not very many I would reckon. You would have heard about it by now if there was. SF wouldn’t miss such an opportunity.

@Conor Doherty: yeah for sure. Things like urbanisation and migration flows have to play parts too. There does seem to be an economic vampirism element to Ireland’s situation too though, I can’t speak for global trends though.

@Sean Minihane: I found this with a quick search:
“Four members of cabinet are landlords, as are five Ministers of State. Nearly one-third of members of the Fine Gael parliamentary party are landlords. One in three Fianna Fail TDs are also landlords.”
It’s from PbP in 2019. Wouldn’t it make a good article for an interested journalist?

@Podge: There is some middle ground though – people are perhaps not objecting to the result of a putative free market so much as government insistence that the Irish housing market is one and that it can be relied upon to resolve itself in time largely through those mechanisms. I think we probably all agree that this isn’t a functional free market in many respects. Nonetheless, I think the claims that regulation is choking supply may be overstated (we know why there is so little supply post 2008) particular by those with an interest in circumventing them. This is normal horse trading as well. I’d also say if anyone thinks there isn’t free competition in the Irish market, pop into an auction and bid on a house.

@Conor Doherty: yeah in fairness this is in part the result of what happened during the Celtic Tiger as so many trades people left. But that excuse only works for a few years after. There’s huge demand for housing that’s not being met and it’s only in part due to the lack of trades people.
And in terms of free competition there is competition in a sense for what’s already on the market, but what makes it to market is so restricted. And even then there are restraints on my ability to compete in the market due to central bank rules on borrowing. Not that that’s a bad thing but lots of people aren’t allowed to compete in the market due to these rules.

@Podge: Well, “a few years after” runs up to about 2014, 2015 I reckon. The market only started to pick up again about then. That’s a long time not building houses – I don’t think we’re seeing the end of that effect and I guess Covid came at a really bad time for that too.

@Bramley Hawthorne: less than one third or 33% of FG/FF are landlords. If you did better research you would see last year that this has now reduced down to 25% of current TDs are landlords or own farmland. So a whooping 75% of TDs are not landlords and have no vested interested in rents. Its all freely available information for anyone who wants to look, but for some reason people keep sprouting conspiracy nonsense about TDs being landlords.

@Eamonn O’Hanrahan: No it’s not. People don’t bust their gut working to live in a caravan. There really is no excuse for how bad things are gone here when working people are struggling to have options when it comes to buying a proper house.

@Eamonn O’Hanrahan: like direct provision camps!!

@Eamonn O’Hanrahan: theres a job waiting for ya in government. “if ya can’t afford rent.. just live in a caravan on the side of the motorway!”. Sounds like a scheme Darragh O’Brien might implement himself.
Me, personally, I think lowering rents would be a better solution.

the tax payer should provide a safety net and not a hammock. My issue is that low cost affordable and practical options are regulated out of existence. If a person is homeless or on a low income or on a higher income and wants to fund tho occasional foreign holiday or whatever, then what the hell is wrong with getting a cheap plot somewhere and a mobile home. As for refugees, I don’t see a problem helping them out to a minimum extent and letting them have the opportunity to work their way up. As for vested interests, anyone who is renting their property for 20 odd k a year will be happy for things to remain unchanged and I am against that. No one deserves to get their dream home for free. But they should be allowed to take what they can comfortably afford, planning complexities kill many viable options.

@Eamonn O’Hanrahan: Probably heading for American style mobile home parks here. Surely it won’t get to shanty town levels but ya never know.

@Eamonn O’Hanrahan: are you for real bud?
This is your solution to the problem?
But mobile house, bud you mad in the head

@Eamonn O’Hanrahan: are you for real bud?
This is your solution to the problem?
Buy mobile house people !
bud you mad in the head.