“The average house price in the late 1980s was €42,000. Adjusted for inflation, that is around €80,000 in today’s money. In contrast, the buyers of today spend €272,000 on average on a home.”
Remember this the next time some older person calls young people “lazy” for not being able to afford a home.
My parents bought a 3 bed in Cork City for £20k and got a loan for the deposit in 1989, and it’s only in the last few weeks have they come to realise that no matter how much I save or sacrifice, I’ll probably never own my own place. A college education and/or a decent job means nothing now.
The problem is that cheaper housing means lower existing house prices, and no one who owns a house is ever going to vote to lower the price of their own house.
What I don’t understand is, since we know that the government is doing anything to make things better, why is only a very small percentage of people willing to manifest their anger at this system? Why are people so accepting of all of this, like it was inevitable?
I am a home owner of 5 years but in a small house we almost had to fight for and I consider myself lucky. Was in that cycle of almost being able to afford a mortgage to purchase a house. Every time my salary was increasing, the cost of properties kept increasing by more than we could afford. We kept getting outbid on suitable properties no matter what we did. In the end we did manage to get one that just about worked on what we considered our last throw of the dice to own a property. Fast forward 5 years and even though our financial position is much better, we cannot look to trade up to a more suitable one as 1 there aren’t any properties anyway around us and 2 even if they were, the affordability gap has widened meaning the cycle we were in when we were first trying to buy is even worse. Our hope now is to try to renovate and extend but prices for both of those options have gone through the roof so we are stuck in that cycle now. The problems of home ownership don’t stop when you buy your first home, they just morph into something else. I’m still so grateful for getting past stage 1 though.
My mam doubled her money in five years on her first house and she got legitimately angry when i said that that kind of market is not sustainable.
She reckons they should just let young ppl borrow more
Have a partner that’s going through insolvency at the min which means we’re severely restricted in getting a mortgage.
Had my mother tell me that because we both have decent enough jobs we should be able to go for a mortgage and the fact that we don’t shows we’re happy enough to be stuck in a small 2 bedroom apartment with 2 young kids.
My parents bought they’re house in the 80s with my father working as a postman, they have absolute no clue what’s going on with hosing in this country and have the idea that anyone who can’t afford to buy a house is either lazy or a waster.
While trying to pay rent and save what little money you can for deposit for house, you neglect your own pension so it’s going to be a fun time when we all hit the age of 60 and we are absolutely fucked, no money or source of income because we spent it all on buying a house, seriously I’m 28 and I know absolutely nobody with a pension we are all in the rat race of saving for a house……that we most likely will never get
People seem to forget that a decent wage means fuck all if everything costs too much, and prices are rising faster than your pay.
20k was grand to afford on a single salary in the 80s. You could buy your house and feed your family.
Now you need two working adults, no kids, a college education and a good, reliable job to even dream of getting a home.
Its disgusting.
It’s bad enough that we’re getting railed so hard. But why do so many people who got their shit sorted for a pittance in the 80s/90s feel entitled to be so cunty to the younger generation about it? The amount of yis with smug fucker parents who haven’t a clue what they’re talking about is intensely demoralising.
42 years of age, don’t own and never will.
I declined a mortgage I’d been approved for in 2007 (110% – €380k) which worked out at the time because I was redundant in 2008.
But now I’m stuck as a tenant unless I win the lotto or an uncle I don’t know leaves me a container of cash.
The reduction in ownership is intentional, driven by large investment capital. Government don’t care
My Grandparents bought their house in Rosslare Strand for £6000 back in the 60’s. That same house now worth 500k just because of where it is. Madness
I was able to borrow ten times my income in 2005 to buy. The house hasn’t gone up in value since due to the crash, I sold it last year for exactly what I paid for it. But I’d built up equity and was then able to buy a much better house. My youngest sibling earns a LOT more than I did when I bought that house and can’t afford anything on his salary. He’s sharing a house with 3 other lads, whereas when I was his age I was paying a reasonable mortgage payment to live in a 3 bed semi on my own, when I needed some more cash I rented out one of the bedrooms for a few months. The current system is broken.
The whole article talks about a couple, imagine being single. It is a whole other kettle of fish. You have no chance.
We need greater information on home ownership. I want to know exactly who bought all the homes in the last 30 years and what they’re doing with them.
If there are offshore pension companies hoarding them then they should be taxed into oblivion.
If there are landlords with 15/20 properties then there should be a tiered marginal rate of income tax introduced dependant on the number of properties one rents (5,10,15,30 etc).
I want to know how many homes are derelict as a result of NAMA mismanagement and I want incentives to redevelop them. Unregistered developer VAT reclaims for one off renovations of derelict properties.
I want to know what parts of Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway have the most derelict shopfronts and whether we could rezone and develop apartments in these inner city areas.
I want details of medium/large towns derelict properties such as old pubs, hotels, shops, churches etc which could be redeveloped.
Don’t forget the ‘first time buyer’ grants. People just got a couple of grand to kit out their first home when they bought them. The premise of Ireland’s long term plan for people living here is that you pay for a home you’ll own long before retirement and have a few years to build up a pension once your mortgage is paid off. There is no acknowledgment from anyone in power that this model’s time will be up relatively soon and there’s no plan to deal with it.
This is mental, like who do I have to vote for to get cheaper housing options in the next few years? Like the article said, I’ll be holding off starting a family as long as I’m renting and sharing accommodation.
What freaks me out is that the locked out generation are coming into the mortgage dead zone age wise. It’s starting to get too late for them even if it’s fixed overnight, they will not be able to buy, ever.
That means they cannot make provisions for retirement financially or in terms of accommodation. Those people are going to be paying rent right until they’re pushed out of the workforce and onto inadequately funded pensions, and then they’ll have to try to pay rent from that.
If we think the homelessness crisis is bad now, in 10-20 years it’s going to be apocalyptic.
Single people are getting royally fucked here and very little is said about it.
With the current market prices, the 3.5:1 borrowing to income ratio makes it impossible for a single person to own a home.
I’ve stopped seeing family members over this. Not parents but my aunt and her family. They own a property portfolio and had no issue calling me lazy because a flat where I live (Zone 4, London) is 9 times my gross income. It’s ridiculous that those alleged to be wiser than us are so selfish and insular.
This constantly weighs on my mind as I get older, I’ve worked hard but I’m still renting. Nothing is my own, I work to make money for other people and I have no real security. I still see light at the end of the tunnel, but I’m half convinced it’s a train.
I had to move away for 4 years and live in a 1 bed flat in Melbourne to afford a deposit
It’s not a ‘generation gap’ though, it applies to anyone who isn’t ‘on the property ladder’…
In 2019, I had to sell my house ‘for reasons’. I moved back into my parents place ‘for a few months’ until I found a new place. Then the pandemic came along and the property market took off…
Now I’m 48, single and living in my parents house! Fuck me, how did that happen?!
I have a decent deposit amount, but my borrowing options are limited. By age, as I can only get mortgages with shorter terms, and also due to my single salary status.
Luckily I get along great with my folks, but a grown man needs a place of his own. The house prices are constantly bid up out of my reach. It’s fucking soul destroying.
Any nice girls out there wanna share a mortgage?! 😂
This is a national emergency that is destroying society, noone in the coming generation will have children, both partners working full time to struggle for years bidding on property mostly outside of where they grew up as they have been priced out of their area and if your single, well that’s a death sentence.
Our generation will be paying the pensions for the selfish pricks who left us this mess and we will have noone to pay our pension. Unfortunately only option is emigration again, shame we as a people cant get our shit together. Get out while you can.
It still boggles the mind that my Secretary mother and Electrician father were able to get a mortgage for a house in the 90s. Not exactly high earning jobs.
Now compare me and my girlfriend, Masters and PhD educated in secure jobs on good money basically laughed out of the room when applying for a mortgage.
It’s scary.
“Every year that goes by, the price is going up and, right now, it feels pretty hopeless,” Megan said.
“I thought you’d be long gone,” Jack said. “But I think you’re going to be with me for another while longer.”
If only there was some solution says the guy with two houses and the daughter desperately trying to buy one.
Wages have increased 100% and property prices by 230% in real terms since back in the day. Hello two income households, the building and financial industry is happy to see you.
We need to build build build, but every day we read about objections, objections, objections… usually from people who bought their first house decades ago.
I genuinely think I might be a little asexual. The thought of having sex legit makes me feel ill. I’ve no interest in entering a romantic relationship at any point, it just seems to me like the idea of having to check in with someone all the time as stifling. Very much not for me. But it seems like to stand even a margin of a chance of ever getting my own place, I would need to couple up. But (and please excuse the expression), it really does feel like whoring myself out for the potential of a roof overhead.
This thread really shows what a shitshow we live in.
I’m lucky that I’m 29 and have a home of my own I bought a few years ago but I also ended up in a well paid job by pure chance and I know I’m extremely lucky.
Governments inaction is a joke.
I’m going to forward this article to every one of my TD’s, Councillors and MEP’s asking what they are doing about this and maybe post the worst response here for a laugh.
Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow, as James Joyce put it.
Fucking grim hearing my 78yr old Da saying sure I wont be around forever and you can use your part of the house to put towards a mortgage 🤦♂️
Say what you will about the 80’s, and I know there was a lot of issues then, but every one of my aunts and uncles were able to buy a house no problem. One of my aunts didn’t even work and her husband was a painter, had no problem buying a house and paying a mortgage. Ireland may have been poor as a country but people were able to buy somewhere to live, whereas Ireland is now considered a rich country but we can’t even get our own place. Maybe our high GDP isn’t the great celebration some seem to think it is.
34 comments
“The average house price in the late 1980s was €42,000. Adjusted for inflation, that is around €80,000 in today’s money. In contrast, the buyers of today spend €272,000 on average on a home.”
Remember this the next time some older person calls young people “lazy” for not being able to afford a home.
My parents bought a 3 bed in Cork City for £20k and got a loan for the deposit in 1989, and it’s only in the last few weeks have they come to realise that no matter how much I save or sacrifice, I’ll probably never own my own place. A college education and/or a decent job means nothing now.
The problem is that cheaper housing means lower existing house prices, and no one who owns a house is ever going to vote to lower the price of their own house.
What I don’t understand is, since we know that the government is doing anything to make things better, why is only a very small percentage of people willing to manifest their anger at this system? Why are people so accepting of all of this, like it was inevitable?
I am a home owner of 5 years but in a small house we almost had to fight for and I consider myself lucky. Was in that cycle of almost being able to afford a mortgage to purchase a house. Every time my salary was increasing, the cost of properties kept increasing by more than we could afford. We kept getting outbid on suitable properties no matter what we did. In the end we did manage to get one that just about worked on what we considered our last throw of the dice to own a property. Fast forward 5 years and even though our financial position is much better, we cannot look to trade up to a more suitable one as 1 there aren’t any properties anyway around us and 2 even if they were, the affordability gap has widened meaning the cycle we were in when we were first trying to buy is even worse. Our hope now is to try to renovate and extend but prices for both of those options have gone through the roof so we are stuck in that cycle now. The problems of home ownership don’t stop when you buy your first home, they just morph into something else. I’m still so grateful for getting past stage 1 though.
My mam doubled her money in five years on her first house and she got legitimately angry when i said that that kind of market is not sustainable.
She reckons they should just let young ppl borrow more
Have a partner that’s going through insolvency at the min which means we’re severely restricted in getting a mortgage.
Had my mother tell me that because we both have decent enough jobs we should be able to go for a mortgage and the fact that we don’t shows we’re happy enough to be stuck in a small 2 bedroom apartment with 2 young kids.
My parents bought they’re house in the 80s with my father working as a postman, they have absolute no clue what’s going on with hosing in this country and have the idea that anyone who can’t afford to buy a house is either lazy or a waster.
While trying to pay rent and save what little money you can for deposit for house, you neglect your own pension so it’s going to be a fun time when we all hit the age of 60 and we are absolutely fucked, no money or source of income because we spent it all on buying a house, seriously I’m 28 and I know absolutely nobody with a pension we are all in the rat race of saving for a house……that we most likely will never get
People seem to forget that a decent wage means fuck all if everything costs too much, and prices are rising faster than your pay.
20k was grand to afford on a single salary in the 80s. You could buy your house and feed your family.
Now you need two working adults, no kids, a college education and a good, reliable job to even dream of getting a home.
Its disgusting.
It’s bad enough that we’re getting railed so hard. But why do so many people who got their shit sorted for a pittance in the 80s/90s feel entitled to be so cunty to the younger generation about it? The amount of yis with smug fucker parents who haven’t a clue what they’re talking about is intensely demoralising.
42 years of age, don’t own and never will.
I declined a mortgage I’d been approved for in 2007 (110% – €380k) which worked out at the time because I was redundant in 2008.
But now I’m stuck as a tenant unless I win the lotto or an uncle I don’t know leaves me a container of cash.
The reduction in ownership is intentional, driven by large investment capital. Government don’t care
My Grandparents bought their house in Rosslare Strand for £6000 back in the 60’s. That same house now worth 500k just because of where it is. Madness
I was able to borrow ten times my income in 2005 to buy. The house hasn’t gone up in value since due to the crash, I sold it last year for exactly what I paid for it. But I’d built up equity and was then able to buy a much better house. My youngest sibling earns a LOT more than I did when I bought that house and can’t afford anything on his salary. He’s sharing a house with 3 other lads, whereas when I was his age I was paying a reasonable mortgage payment to live in a 3 bed semi on my own, when I needed some more cash I rented out one of the bedrooms for a few months. The current system is broken.
The whole article talks about a couple, imagine being single. It is a whole other kettle of fish. You have no chance.
We need greater information on home ownership. I want to know exactly who bought all the homes in the last 30 years and what they’re doing with them.
If there are offshore pension companies hoarding them then they should be taxed into oblivion.
If there are landlords with 15/20 properties then there should be a tiered marginal rate of income tax introduced dependant on the number of properties one rents (5,10,15,30 etc).
I want to know how many homes are derelict as a result of NAMA mismanagement and I want incentives to redevelop them. Unregistered developer VAT reclaims for one off renovations of derelict properties.
I want to know what parts of Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway have the most derelict shopfronts and whether we could rezone and develop apartments in these inner city areas.
I want details of medium/large towns derelict properties such as old pubs, hotels, shops, churches etc which could be redeveloped.
Don’t forget the ‘first time buyer’ grants. People just got a couple of grand to kit out their first home when they bought them. The premise of Ireland’s long term plan for people living here is that you pay for a home you’ll own long before retirement and have a few years to build up a pension once your mortgage is paid off. There is no acknowledgment from anyone in power that this model’s time will be up relatively soon and there’s no plan to deal with it.
This is mental, like who do I have to vote for to get cheaper housing options in the next few years? Like the article said, I’ll be holding off starting a family as long as I’m renting and sharing accommodation.
What freaks me out is that the locked out generation are coming into the mortgage dead zone age wise. It’s starting to get too late for them even if it’s fixed overnight, they will not be able to buy, ever.
That means they cannot make provisions for retirement financially or in terms of accommodation. Those people are going to be paying rent right until they’re pushed out of the workforce and onto inadequately funded pensions, and then they’ll have to try to pay rent from that.
If we think the homelessness crisis is bad now, in 10-20 years it’s going to be apocalyptic.
Single people are getting royally fucked here and very little is said about it.
With the current market prices, the 3.5:1 borrowing to income ratio makes it impossible for a single person to own a home.
I’ve stopped seeing family members over this. Not parents but my aunt and her family. They own a property portfolio and had no issue calling me lazy because a flat where I live (Zone 4, London) is 9 times my gross income. It’s ridiculous that those alleged to be wiser than us are so selfish and insular.
This constantly weighs on my mind as I get older, I’ve worked hard but I’m still renting. Nothing is my own, I work to make money for other people and I have no real security. I still see light at the end of the tunnel, but I’m half convinced it’s a train.
I had to move away for 4 years and live in a 1 bed flat in Melbourne to afford a deposit
It’s not a ‘generation gap’ though, it applies to anyone who isn’t ‘on the property ladder’…
In 2019, I had to sell my house ‘for reasons’. I moved back into my parents place ‘for a few months’ until I found a new place. Then the pandemic came along and the property market took off…
Now I’m 48, single and living in my parents house! Fuck me, how did that happen?!
I have a decent deposit amount, but my borrowing options are limited. By age, as I can only get mortgages with shorter terms, and also due to my single salary status.
Luckily I get along great with my folks, but a grown man needs a place of his own. The house prices are constantly bid up out of my reach. It’s fucking soul destroying.
Any nice girls out there wanna share a mortgage?! 😂
This is a national emergency that is destroying society, noone in the coming generation will have children, both partners working full time to struggle for years bidding on property mostly outside of where they grew up as they have been priced out of their area and if your single, well that’s a death sentence.
Our generation will be paying the pensions for the selfish pricks who left us this mess and we will have noone to pay our pension. Unfortunately only option is emigration again, shame we as a people cant get our shit together. Get out while you can.
It still boggles the mind that my Secretary mother and Electrician father were able to get a mortgage for a house in the 90s. Not exactly high earning jobs.
Now compare me and my girlfriend, Masters and PhD educated in secure jobs on good money basically laughed out of the room when applying for a mortgage.
It’s scary.
“Every year that goes by, the price is going up and, right now, it feels pretty hopeless,” Megan said.
“I thought you’d be long gone,” Jack said. “But I think you’re going to be with me for another while longer.”
If only there was some solution says the guy with two houses and the daughter desperately trying to buy one.
Wages have increased 100% and property prices by 230% in real terms since back in the day. Hello two income households, the building and financial industry is happy to see you.
We need to build build build, but every day we read about objections, objections, objections… usually from people who bought their first house decades ago.
I genuinely think I might be a little asexual. The thought of having sex legit makes me feel ill. I’ve no interest in entering a romantic relationship at any point, it just seems to me like the idea of having to check in with someone all the time as stifling. Very much not for me. But it seems like to stand even a margin of a chance of ever getting my own place, I would need to couple up. But (and please excuse the expression), it really does feel like whoring myself out for the potential of a roof overhead.
This thread really shows what a shitshow we live in.
I’m lucky that I’m 29 and have a home of my own I bought a few years ago but I also ended up in a well paid job by pure chance and I know I’m extremely lucky.
Governments inaction is a joke.
I’m going to forward this article to every one of my TD’s, Councillors and MEP’s asking what they are doing about this and maybe post the worst response here for a laugh.
Who is with me? [www.whoismytd.com](https://www.whoismytd.com)
Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow, as James Joyce put it.
Fucking grim hearing my 78yr old Da saying sure I wont be around forever and you can use your part of the house to put towards a mortgage 🤦♂️
Say what you will about the 80’s, and I know there was a lot of issues then, but every one of my aunts and uncles were able to buy a house no problem. One of my aunts didn’t even work and her husband was a painter, had no problem buying a house and paying a mortgage. Ireland may have been poor as a country but people were able to buy somewhere to live, whereas Ireland is now considered a rich country but we can’t even get our own place. Maybe our high GDP isn’t the great celebration some seem to think it is.