Irish Times: "Banning of bedsits set in train housing disaster"

Leper said:
"if" being the important word . . . and as I pick out my horses before I visit the bookies later this morning I have more confidence on my Saturday Yankee showing a profit than I have in the "market correcting itself" ever, never mind in 3 years like suggested above.

In a short few years time we'll all be enduring the noise of sites being cleared for trailer parks. That's the only "certainty" running today, I regret to say.
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I hope you pick the horses with more care than you use to form your opinions on housing. If governments had stayed out of the market (not printed lots of money) then your house and mine would be worth a lot less.
 
Brendan Burgess said:
Not sure that reflection is needed. I would guess that it was pointed out by economists at the time.
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Did not landlords like I and others on here not say this at the time. Entirely predictable what would happen. And the likes of Una Mulally the IT, middle classes, D4 would all have said how wonderful it would be to get rid of the horrendous bedsits.

Economist have no clue. So I'm surprised you think they would have an idea of the rental market. Not when it comes to reality.
 
Bronte said:
Did not landlords like I and others on here not say this at the time. Entirely predictable what would happen. And the likes of Una Mulally the IT, middle classes, D4 would all have said how wonderful it would be to get rid of the horrendous bedsits.

Economist have no clue. So I'm surprised you think they would have an idea of the rental market. Not when it comes to reality.
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Una was one of the people howling with rage in the late 90s that all apartments were not dual aspect and were "too small", around the time they changed the minimum size of a 1 bed to 55m2 with a stipulation that the majority in any development were supposed to be 10% bigger again or 60m2, which is nearly the size of my 2 storey 2 bed house.

I lived in loads of these, good bad and indifferent. They had many quality issues but the main issue was usually that they were poorly managed and it only took one bad tenant to make everyone else in the building miserable. BER ratings didn't matter quite so much when the place was quite small & ESB prices were a lot less than they are now. They were typically around 10-20m2, much smaller than even the smallest 1 bed apartments.

Its not entirely true that "landlords" ended up benefiting from this - it happened at a time serial landlords were in financial difficulty as lenders started calling in interest only loans or other businesses started running into difficulty. I recall a former landlord, whose top storey flat I'd rented from 02-04, put that house on the market for 600k in 2008 - it failed to sell, & he took it off the market. I see from PPR it eventually was sold, in 2014, for 80k. I recall overhearing a solicitor working for one bank in 2014 mentioning he'd put 300 investor repossessions in that day.

Una isn't looking at the cold hard realities facing many of the "old school" pre 63 units now: if they were merely "dated" in my early days of renting in 1999 compared to purpose built apartments, they are positively antediluvian now. Here's a good example - guide price of €995,000. No mention of what price tag would be attached to make it meet minimum standards now, but suggestion a full restore priced 300k would bring it back to 1.5m in value, or upgrading as flats would command annual rent of 120k. It did sell, but for 840k. Why so cheap? You can work that out from the original advert here: the original 1963 declaration had it as 6 flats, but in 1983 the then owner designed to redo the layout & changed it into 8 flats, which made it non compliant from a planning perspective. They, or any subsequent owners, then failed to maintain the property, as you can see in the photos. Hence the lower than expected selling price.

Its really hard to extrapolate from census or PPR just how many of these are still in use, but last census seems to suggest about 50,000. I would imagine there are very few prospective landlords with 1m+ burning a hole in their pockets to buy up & refurbish, so I imagine all of these are being bought by some kind of institutional investor, refurbed & then re-let.
 
lff12 said:
Una was one of the people howling with rage in the late 90s that all apartments were not dual aspect and were "too small", around the time they changed the minimum size of a 1 bed to 55m2 with a stipulation that the majority in any development were supposed to be 10% bigger again or 60m2, which is nearly the size of my 2 storey 2 bed house.

I lived in loads of these, good bad and indifferent. They had many quality issues but the main issue was usually that they were poorly managed and it only took one bad tenant to make everyone else in the building miserable. BER ratings didn't matter quite so much when the place was quite small & ESB prices were a lot less than they are now. They were typically around 10-20m2, much smaller than even the smallest 1 bed apartments.

Its not entirely true that "landlords" ended up benefiting from this - it happened at a time serial landlords were in financial difficulty as lenders started calling in interest only loans or other businesses started running into difficulty. I recall a former landlord, whose top storey flat I'd rented from 02-04, put that house on the market for 600k in 2008 - it failed to sell, & he took it off the market. I see from PPR it eventually was sold, in 2014, for 80k. I recall overhearing a solicitor working for one bank in 2014 mentioning he'd put 300 investor repossessions in that day.

Una isn't looking at the cold hard realities facing many of the "old school" pre 63 units now: if they were merely "dated" in my early days of renting in 1999 compared to purpose built apartments, they are positively antediluvian now. Here's a good example - guide price of €995,000. No mention of what price tag would be attached to make it meet minimum standards now, but suggestion a full restore priced 300k would bring it back to 1.5m in value, or upgrading as flats would command annual rent of 120k. It did sell, but for 840k. Why so cheap? You can work that out from the original advert here: the original 1963 declaration had it as 6 flats, but in 1983 the then owner designed to redo the layout & changed it into 8 flats, which made it non compliant from a planning perspective. They, or any subsequent owners, then failed to maintain the property, as you can see in the photos. Hence the lower than expected selling price.

Its really hard to extrapolate from census or PPR just how many of these are still in use, but last census seems to suggest about 50,000. I would imagine there are very few prospective landlords with 1m+ burning a hole in their pockets to buy up & refurbish, so I imagine all of these are being bought by some kind of institutional investor, refurbed & then re-let.
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I'd imagine wealthy owner occupiers would buy these as well as convert them back into family homes. Anecdotally I heard that happened to a lot of the old redbrick houses in Rathmines and areas like that which had been bedsits.
 
lff12 said:
I recall a former landlord, whose top storey flat I'd rented from 02-04, put that house on the market for 600k in 2008 - it failed to sell, & he took it off the market. I see from PPR it eventually was sold, in 2014, for 80k.
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600k to 80k :eek:

- and Bertie Ahern was shuffling around the FF AGM in Galway last weekend muttering about how he wouldn't rule out being President!
 
Greenbook said:
I'd imagine wealthy owner occupiers would buy these as well as convert them back into family homes. Anecdotally I heard that happened to a lot of the old redbrick houses in Rathmines and areas like that which had been bedsits.
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Yes - the figure I heard for the loss of Rathmines units from 1996 to 2000 was 1000. If there was an average of 7 units per house, thats probably just 142 houses turned back into family homes - or 28/29 per year. And that was before the days of SEAI grants etc, when you were on your own in doing historical restorations.
 
Greenbook said:
I'd imagine wealthy owner occupiers would buy these as well as convert them back into family homes. Anecdotally I heard that happened to a lot of the old redbrick houses in Rathmines and areas like that which had been bedsits.
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Yes they did - esp around Sandford Rd, Palmerstown Rd, the Squares around Rathmines. Sandford Rd was going for 800k plus by even 1997. Similar on that road now go for between 995k and 1.3m according to the PPR.
 
Too late now to go looking back...

1) Few want to be landlords these days.

2) Something with a poor standard would seem to be better than tent.
 
lff12 said:
Una was one of the people howling with rage in the late 90s that all apartments were not dual aspect and were "too small", around the time they changed the minimum size of a 1 bed to 55m2 with a stipulation that the majority in any development were supposed to be 10% bigger again or 60m2, which is nearly the size of my 2 storey 2 bed house.
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Was she around back then? Anyway, anyone who takes her seriously on any subject relating to anything to do with money or economics needs to have a serious talk with themselves.
 
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