One of Ireland’s largest property developers has claimed state planning policy is the biggest obstacle to building homes – despite boasting in its annual report that it’s sitting on successful planning applications for more than double its usual output.

Glenveagh, which claimed revenue of €649 million in 2022, has also in the last two years sold at least three sites – with planning permission included – in deals worth more than €100 million.

CEO Stephen Garvey however has made repeated claims about what he calls Ireland’s “dysfunctional planning policy”, which he says is encumbering efforts to address the country’s housing crisis. A Glenveagh spokesperson told The Ditch, “Failure to obtain planning permission on sites in our one to three year sales pipeline” may affect the company’s projections.

Rest in the article.

10 comments

  2. Seems like it’ll get less traction as a story than it deserves. Big developer gumming up planning resources and sitting / speculating on sites it doesn’t intend to build

  3. Hang on wasn’t the dich just giving out about corruption in the planning system now their given our about approvals

  4. Glenveagh is an interesting company if you want to understand the Irish housing market – and some of the problems with it.

    The idea was to mimic what has worked for companies in the UK – forward funding of large scale apartment building through partnership with institutional investors and stock market funding where investors provide equity capital.

    It hasn’t worked very well, and you [wouldn’t have been massively happy over the last few years were you an investor](https://i.imgur.com/YfIJN6u.png).

    Glenveagh has therefore pivited their strategy away from forward funded apartment buildings and towards suburban houses. They were originally going to build about 30% apartments, it now looks like that number will be below 10% as Glenveagh sells off the parts of their land bank that was meant to go to apartments.

    Part of that is down to changes in the planning process, mainly DCC moving towards higher standards for build to rent developments since Glenveagh planned their strategy.

    Another part of it is difficulties with their modular timber frame strategy which hasn’t worked so far due to lumbar price inflation.

    The bottom line though is that the reason Glenveagh are selling off sites is simple – they need to respond to investors and they are over capitalised, too much assets for the profit they’re making. The best way to change that is to make more profit, but they cannot because they can’t ramp up their building fast enough. The other way is to sell off assets and return money to shareholders through buybacks, which is what they’ve been doing for the last two years.

  7. I don’t know what it having any amount of successful applications matters. They could have 70 trillion successful applications. There still may be issues with our planning policy’s that are causing the issues we are seeing.

  8. They are waiting on tax payer money either via:

    public contracts for social housing

    Subsidized finance

    Gov underwritten finance

    Basically waiting for their neoliberal friends in fg to come up with new ways to extract money from the state/tax payers.

  9. Having a pipeline of planning permissions is pretty normal. This is a bit like complaining that Tesco have a lot of inventory in the store room versus what they sold today. If you had no pipeline of permissions you could end up in a scenario where your capacity to build exceeds what you’ve permission for etc

  10. The Ditch are really scraping the barrell with this crap now and the [minor traffic offence](https://www.ontheditch.com/stephen-donnelly-untaxed/) they “unearthed” there yesterday. Seems they aren’t content with breaking huge stories every other week and are told to fling any shite, any day to see what sticks.
    Anything this company says should be taken with much salt and asterixes, developers like these are hardly an honest, impartial source when it comes to talking about our housing crisis.

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