22 luxury apartments bought for €11m in Dublin 4 for social housing

[Greenbook]

Where's the legislation that would entice a landlord back into the market.

The new system certainly won't do that. It confirms that the current rent control system (described as among the strictest in the world) is now permanent. I know a landlord will be able to increase to market value between tenancies, but that is a right landlords always had and continued to have elsewhere. I'd say also good luck with getting a significant increase after 6 years, the political system simply won't allow that to happen.

The right to sell with vacant possession is gone entirely for 55% of landlords and very restricted for the remaining 45%. Aside from devaluing your property, as AlbacoreA correctly points out, the right to evict to sell was a comfort for landlords as you could just sell up if you had a difficult tenant and no faith that the RTB would take your side.

 

[jpd]

And if we entice enough foreign workers to come and build our houses, where do we house them while there here?

 

[AlbacoreA]

And if we entice enough foreign workers to come and b

Are they not already here. Why are we not leveraging them.

 

[Dr Strangelove]

But in Europe it's usually accompanied by strong legislation protecting landlords. We don't have that.

It’s quite possible to strengthen the rights of tenants and landlords.

Policy discourse in Ireland is unfortunately entirely framed as a zero-sum tug of war between tenants and landlords.

Where's the legislation that would entice a landlord back into the market.

I’ve long argued that a return of the capital gains exemption for rental properties held for seven years would be a great policy and it’s orthogonal to the tenants’/landlords’ rights debate. It helped to put a floor on the market 2011-14.

 

[jpd]

Are they not already here. Why are we not leveraging them.

We are talking about increasing the housing output from 30,000 per year to 50,000 per year - so no, they are not here.
All the building workers here are already employed building the 30,000 so we would need a lot more to get to 50,000

 

[AlbacoreA]

We'll not get back to that because banks and developers won't over extend like they did in the Celtic tiger. Tradesmen who got caught out the last time left the trade. It's very hard to get people back into the trades again. Not until they all forget and people stop reminding them at least.

Trying to stuff even more people into the country of Ireland when there is no housing, is lunacy. We've been a couple of decades only making it worse. We aren't learning.

 

[MrEarl]

@Greenbook That bleeding heart nonsense needs to be brought to an abrupt end - 5 years is sufficient time to help people get back on their feet, be it find new employment, retrain, or whatever.

With exception of the very small minority who have legitimate illness that prevents them from working, everyone else gets 5-years, then evicted, end of story.

The outcry that you fear, and public reaction from the bleeding heat liberal lefties, is one of the key problems that this country needs to put an end to. We should help people in genuine need of help, but not later be intimidated into having to support them for life, because they won't fend for themselves, imho !

 

[AlbacoreA]

It’s quite possible to strengthen the rights of tenants and landlords.

Policy discourse in Ireland is unfortunately entirely framed as a zero-sum tug of war between tenants and landlords.

Simply describing what is. Isn't framing anything. IMO.

 

[rungun]

Even a blind person can see that the current approach isn't working and hasn't worked, despite approx a decade of the politicans trying to stick with it... it's time for a new approach, not repeating the same mistakes, time and time again, but expecting a different result.

This isn't really the case though.

The State completely changed their approach to the provision of public housing over the last 6-7 years, such that the investment in the sector has been substantial.

Indeed the numbers on the housing lists have fallen by 35%-40%, this despite the explosion in population.

We are adding the guts of 0.50% in public housing per annum. This is seeing it creep up from the lows of 7% to 11-12% now of all the housing stock.

The approach to give money to AHBs at scale was a massive change. The new typologies including Cost Rental a significant departure that really has only seen its first stock emerge in the last 24 months.

In terms of housing provision, we have been near enough to the top of Europe for 4 years now. And this has been propped up by government spending.

Now there's a question on value for money for sure, but I don't agree with the constant refrains that nothing is happening. The idea to blow everything up makes no sense. Just fix the errors (and there's a lot of them) as they go on. PPPs clearly haven't worked with the provision of public housing and led to inflated costs, so change the approach. There's dozens of other things that need changing, Browne has done some of the big ones.

 

[AlbacoreA]

You could be right but I'm not confident in any of these figures.

The Social-Housing Waiting List Is Shrinking - Dublin Inquirer

Thousands have been wiped off it, and thousands more have been moved to a different list. The number actually getting council-owned homes remains tiny.

www.dublininquirer.com

Department accused of 'undercounting council house waiting lists'

The Department of Housing has been accused of downplaying the true number of people languishing on council home waiting lists.

extra.ie

Theres seems an element of political spin to it all. Perhaps I'm bias.

 

[Leo]

The State has plenty of funds, so could easily invest, either directly or via a joint venture, to develop land that it currently owns and is not using and / or redevelop vacant buildings.

The biggest problem with that is has been shown a few times that it costs the LAs ~20% more to build residential units, even on land they already own.

I can't see them ever going back to a model where they directly employ the majority of skills and invest sufficiently in the tooling and facilities needed to build at scale without having to outsource most of the work at the inflated rates they pay due to the constraints required to meet procurement, oversight, and other requirements.

 

[Protocol]

The biggest problem with that is has been shown a few times that it costs the LAs ~20% more to build residential units, even on land they already own.

Are you sure?

See article in the IT on 18-Nov 2020

Local councils can build social housing at half the cost of private developers
Eoin Burke-Kennedy
Last Updated: Wednesday, November 18, 2020, 03:00

Some local councils are paying private developers up to €400,000 for social housing units when the councils themselves canbuild them directly at half the price, Department of Housing figures suggest.

The figures provided by Minister for Housing Darragh O’Brien in response to a parliamentary question from Sinn Féin’sEoin Ó Broin show how much local councils paid last year for so-called turnkey purchases, which are bought directly fromprivate developers for social housing tenants.

In several areas, the average cost of these acquisitions was nearly double the cost of the social housing units developeddirectly by the council. The figures do not contain detail about the size or spec of the units.

InFingal County Council, the average cost of turnkey acquisitions in 2019 was €412,000 compared with €209,300 for thenew builds delivered directly by the council. A similar differential was recorded in Dublin City Council where the average cost of turnkey purchases was €382,200 compared with€181,500 for its direct builds.

Cork City Council paid an average of €306,800 for its purchased units while those it built directly cost €266,300.

In Galway City, the average cost of turnkey acquisitions last year was €352,700 but there was no figure recorded for itsdirect builds.

The cost of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown’s direct builds in 2019 was €201,700, but there was no figure for the cost of itsturnkey purchases.

In 2018, they cost on average €396,900 compared to €239,900 for its direct builds that year.

In some local authority areas, such as Donegal, Kildare and Cork County, however, the difference in cost was only marginaland not financially significant.

Typically councils procure about two-thirds of their social housing needs from the private sector as turnkey acquisitions.

The department cautioned “that a range of dwelling types at various price ranges” were covered by the figures while notingthat the cost of delivery can vary greatly depending on the type of development and the area involved.

Sinn Féin’s Eoin Ó Broin: Government policy should focus on increasing the direct delivery of social homes by local authorities.

Photograph: Gareth Chaney/Collins
Sinn Féin’s Eoin Ó Broin: Government policy should focus on increasing the direct delivery of social homes by local authorities.Photograph: Gareth Chaney/Collins
However, Mr Ó Broin said the figures clearly showed that where the council was the lead developer it was much more costeffective.
“Therefore Government policy should focus on increasing the direct delivery of social homes by local authorities,” he said.
He said the reason why councils were choosing turnkeys over direct development was because of the Government’s “overlybureaucratic approval, tendering and value-for-money requirement” on local authority-led projects, which made it a muchslower process.
“If we want more local authority-led developments we have to streamline the approval, tendering, value-for-moneyexercises

 

[Protocol]

The biggest problem with that is has been shown a few times that it costs the LAs ~20% more to build residential units, even on land they already own.

Given that direct-build reduces or eliminates some of the costs embedded in turnkey houses, I can't see how direct-build would be dearer?


Direct-build, using a building contractor

• No 15% developer's profit margin, just lower builder's margin
• No high cost of development finance baked into cost, instead the cost of finance is what the LA or AHB can borrow at, e.g GY City Council borrowed this week at 3.35% over 30 years. Whereas development finance is more like 8%

 

[AlbacoreA]

Makes no sense to me either. They keep saying outsourcing is cheaper but yet the price keeps climbing.

 

[BIG-notorious]

Given that direct-build reduces or eliminates some of the costs embedded in turnkey houses, I can't see how direct-build would be dearer?

Specifications, time, and the prices for direct build generally don't include the site cost which is obviously substantial. And change orders. Oh god, change orders....

A private sector developer will generally (assuming there's a profitable market) get going as soon as they can. Public sector will take forever at every stage of design and implementation. Private sector will design to be compliant with requirements and enable them to sell/lease when complete. Public sector will try to design the perfect building which obviously doesn't exist, so it'll cost double the private sector in the contract price.

And the public sector will let itself be reamed (by the entire design team & contractor) with increased fees for change orders (usually required because the same design team did a crap job in the first place) that a private sector would rightly tell the design team & contractor to either shove up their holes or look forward to never working for the client again.

But the main one is speed at the moment. A house/office/whatever built today will cost a lot less than the building than the building built in 5 years time when the public sector has finally finished faffing around and has a contract signed with the main works contractor— partly because of headline price, and partly because the people/staff/functions need to be accommodated during that 5 years which will not come for free. Not getting robbed with change orders and a 50 to 100% premium on "future proofed" (which is really just proof of stupid) designs is also a nice bonus.

 

[Leo]

Direct-build, using a building contractor

And how did the Children's hospital work out??

Perhaps things heave changed but for quite a few years DCC were happy stating it was cheaper for them to buy on the open market than build on land they already owned. Here's one of a few previous threads with links to articles and DCC figures.

 

[AlbacoreA]

Considering all the scandals with building to regulations in the private sector. I'm not sure it's as picture perfect or as cost efficient as painted.

 

[rungun]

You could be right but I'm not confident in any of these figures.

The Social-Housing Waiting List Is Shrinking - Dublin Inquirer

Thousands have been wiped off it, and thousands more have been moved to a different list. The number actually getting council-owned homes remains tiny.

www.dublininquirer.com

Department accused of 'undercounting council house waiting lists'

The Department of Housing has been accused of downplaying the true number of people languishing on council home waiting lists.

extra.ie

Theres seems an element of political spin to it all. Perhaps I'm bias.

They can transfer to the list if they deem their need is not met.

There were 143k "publically houses" (social, AHB) etc in 2016. There were 183k by the end of 2021. In the 3.5 years, 10k+ were built per annum. Obviously there are ones that are sold on and also ones that become derelict.

So the estimate is about 11% of houses, up from 7%. Of the housing output between 2016-2022, 20% were LA / AHB. Since then really it is over 33%.

So the proportion is rising all the time. The target is about 20%.

Now this is all very expensive, I accept that. The fact that the population continues to explode does not help any of this. The reality is the Government are running against an escalator at times, albeit they choose to....

 

[Purple]

As for who will build the housing, simply advertise for trades people to come here, from other parts of the world, just like we've seen other counties do in times past. Offer them a good wage, a fixed term residents visa and the opportunity to apply for full citizenship, if they don't cause any issues during the initial fixed term visa.

There's a housing shortage in most of the developed world and a corresponding skills shortage. Most of the people we need are working in countries with a lower cost of living nearer to where they come from.

 

[Purple]

Makes no sense to me either. They keep saying outsourcing is cheaper but yet the price keeps climbing.

The prices would be rising faster if the State was building directly.