Landlord incentives

Fake tales if we rent a room out in our home we can get 14k tax free. we have the space. We originally kept the apartment as it was in seious negative equity. We would still be selling it below what we paid for it but thankfully have made a massive dent in the mortgage. Notice papers will be seved next week.
 
Calico said:
Had they extended the rent-a-room scheme to include it I would for sure rent it out.
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The question for the State is how to get every habitable housing unit occupied. That's what taxation policy should be aimed at. If a landlord sells their rental unit there's still going to be someone living in it.

Taxing vacant and under utilised housing units is a better form of social engineering than giving tax breaks to landlords to stay in the market.
The point of the rent a room scheme is to increase the occupancy rate in under occupied homes. Giving the same tax breaks to landlords makes no sense as it doesn't house more people.
 
Purple said:
Taxing vacant and under utilised housing units is a better form of social engineering than giving tax breaks to landlords to stay in the market.
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The problem with taxes generally is that they're easy to game.

Don't like paying income tax? Don't work.
Don't like paying VAT? Pay cash.
Don't like paying CGT? Hold on to all your assets til you die.
Don't like your children being lumbered with CAT? Postpone gifts until they're old and more affluent.
Don't like paying a vacant homes tax? Get someone to live there for a few months of the year, move in yourself if you need to, or just buy timers and waste electricity to fool people into thinking someone is living there.
Purple said:
Giving the same tax breaks to landlords makes no sense as it doesn't house more people.
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That's a bit mad. The last serious endeavour to give tax breaks to landlords, the various Section 23 schemes, provided a huge volume of badly-needed housing which today house vast numbers of people.
 
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T McGibney said:
The problem with taxes generally is that they're easy to game.

Don't like paying income tax? Don't work.
Don't like paying VAT? Pay cash.
Don't like paying CGT? Hold on to all your assets til you die.
Don't like your children being lumbered with CAT? Postpone gifts until they're old and more affluent.
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I agree, but property taxes are less easy to game and they don't act as a disincentive to work.
T McGibney said:
That's a bit mad. The last serious endeavour to give tax breaks to landlords, the various Section 23 schemes, provided a huge volume of badly-needed housing.
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It also contributed significantly to the crash. I owned a Section 23 apartment and it was great but we live in different times and the money fuelling the current affordability problems we have is not coming from the domestic economy. Lack of money isn't what's causing out housing shortage, a lack of labour is the main driver, along with the incompetence and inefficiency of the State. Therefore giving more money to anyone other than those directly working in the construction sector doesn't help the problem.

An extra PAYE allowance for Bricklayers, plumbers, plasterers, scaffolders etc, now that would actually help.
 
Purple said:
I agree, but property taxes are less easy to game and they don't act as a disincentive to work.
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Property taxes are very easy to game. The easiest way to game them is to depend on the State to house you.
Purple said:
It also contributed significantly to the crash.
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"We had a crash so never should build housing again because property development is financially risky" has been the governing philosophy in Ireland for 15 years now.

It's going very well.
 
T McGibney said:
Property taxes are very easy to game. The easiest way to game them is to depend on the State to house you.

"We had a crash so never should build housing again because property development is financially risky" has been the governing philosophy in Ireland for 15 years now.

It's going very well.
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I had a reply written to that but we've pulled enough threads off topic between us. :)
 
Purple said:
I had a reply written to that but we've pulled enough threads off topic between us. :)
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No need to take anything off-topic though. "We had a crash so never again should ever incentivise the creation of housing" and any genuine rebuttal of that is hardly off topic when the topic is "Landlord incentives"
 
T McGibney said:
"We had a crash so never again should ever incentivise the creation of housing"
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I didn't say that and don't agree with it. I was making a different point.
If we want to incentivise the building of housing we should look to aid in the provision of the resource that is in the shortest supply and that is labour. Then we should look to remove the many blocks caused by the inefficiency and incompetence of the State. Money is not a constraint so there's no point in incentivising additional supply. If it was a constraint then there would be a rationale to incentivising additional supply.
 
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Purple said:
If we want to incentivise the building of housing we should look to aid in the provision of the resource that is in the shortest supply and that is labour.
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Oddly enough when another tech giant wants to open or expand here, we don't tell them to wait until we think we've enough available workers in whatever location they choose.

When it comes to housebuilding, we're stuck in a 1970s central planning mentality that's as equally afraid of success as it is of failure.

The irony is that if we provide incentives that don't work, we can easily scrap and replace them with refinements or strategies that do.

What have we to lose by action compared to the harm that inaction is doing?
 
T McGibney said:
Oddly enough when another tech giant wants to open or expand here, we don't tell them to wait until we think we've enough available workers in whatever location they choose.
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It's worse than that. We actively encourage them to come here and build offices and data centres to encourage them.

We should pause them and build houses instead.

Brendan
 
Calico said:
Had they extended the rent-a-room scheme to include it I would for sure rent it out.
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So basically income would need to be pretty much tax free for you.

I don't think that is unusual to be honest.

The rent a room scheme is in my opinion very generous. It's also for a different purpose, to increase the number of people per dwelling.

It would be very difficult to apply a stick in such situation so a bigger carrot is needed. A stick would need to be a vacant room tax.
 
faketales said:
So basically income would need to be pretty much tax free for you.

I don't think that is unusual to be honest.

The rent a room scheme is in my opinion very generous. It's also for a different purpose, to increase the number of people per dwelling.

It would be very difficult to apply a stick in such situation so a bigger carrot is needed. A stick would need to be a vacant room tax.
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If the State stopped taxing my income I could buy a few apartments and rent them out. Now there's a solution I could get behind!
 
faketales said:
So basically income would need to be pretty much tax free for you.

I don't think that is unusual to be honest.

The rent a room scheme is in my opinion very generous. It's also for a different purpose, to increase the number of people per dwelling.

It would be very difficult to apply a stick in such situation so a bigger carrot is needed. A stick would need to be a vacant room tax.
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Yes it is very very generous. Whereby a tenant in social housing is allowed to avail of this. Now that a vacant homes tax has been introduced it is only a matter of time before a vacant bedroom tax is.
 
Leo said:
No, it really isn't. Certainly not directly, but perhaps property taxes should be higher and act as a greater incentive for people with more space than they require to downsize.
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Yes property taxes should be for all. To include those living in social housing which is already heavily subsidised and when they have spare capacity can avail of up to €14,000 pa.
 
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