Up to 70 per cent of income earners in the Republic are effectively priced out of the housing market in terms of both rents and house prices, the chair of Land Developement Agency (LDA) has said.<\/p>\n
In an address to the Dublin Economic Workshop\u2019s annual conference in Wexford, Cormac O\u2019Rourke said earners in the first six income deciles, in other words those earning up to \u20ac68,400 per annum, could not afford the average market rent or the average purchase price of a home without State support.<\/p>\n
He presented figures the middle cohort of earners here, those earning \u20ac45,400-\u20ac63,400 a year,<\/p>\n
The average market rent nationally (now in excess of \u20ac2,000 a month) was more than 35 per cent of the net income of these earners, he said.<\/p>\n
Similarly four times their income (the amount allowable under the mortgage rules) did not equate to the average purchase price of a home in the Republic, now in excess of \u20ac422,000. <\/p>\n
Asked if this constituted market failure, Mr O\u2019Rourke said the figures for Ireland roughly matched those in Germany, the Netherlands and the UK.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s been a significant jump in the cost of construction,\u201d he said, linking it to the acceleration in energy costs in the wake of Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine.<\/p>\n
In his presentation, Mr O\u2019Rourke also highlighted long development times – on average 5-7 years from land purchase to housing delivery – as another significant factor inflating end prices.<\/p>\n
On the upside, he said the LDA would soon become the biggest supplier of new homes in the State, eclipsing publicly-quoted companies Glenveagh and Cairn. <\/p>\n
The agency, he said, was on track to deliver 2000-2,500 new homes in 2026 and up to 3,500 in 2027.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat is bigger than either Cairn or Glenveagh,\u201d Mr O\u2019Rourke said.<\/p>\n
The LDA is currently building on around 20 sites nationally and has 24,000 housing units (at various stages of planning and construction) in its pipeline, he said.<\/p>\n
These ranged \u201cfrom houses in the suburbs where we\u2019ve inherited lands from State bodies but the vast bulk of what we do is apartment construction\u201d.<\/p>\n
Mr Rourke also spoke of the agency\u2019s challenge to deliver almost 1,000 homes on the site of the former Central Mental Hospital in Dundrum in Dublin, which is now subject to a legal challenge.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s extremely frustrating, we should be delivering 1,000 homes there this year,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s very frustrating to have situation where the State entities with the capacity to review environmental issues are quite happy with the site and then an individual can relitigate those and hold it up,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s the balance between the common good and the rights of the individual and in the midst of a housing crisis I think the common good has to have a higher weight,\u201d Mr O\u2019Rourke said.<\/p>\n
Frances Ruane, chair of the National Competitiveness and Productivity Council (NCPC), said Irish energy costs were approximately 56 per cent above the EU average and this represetned \u201ca real competitiveness challenge\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Up to 70 per cent of income earners in the Republic are effectively priced out of the housing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":75300,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175],"tags":[79,18,19,17,188],"class_list":{"0":"post-75299","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-markets","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-markets"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75299\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}