> In contrast, rents are a more reliable indicator of a shortage, no speculation there.
You'd think so, wouldn't you?
However, again the Irish market disproves this to some extent.
So generally you look at rents as a 12-14 year payback window of the house price (for investment). What happened in Ireland in the last decade is that rents increased, such that investors could pay more for houses, which increased rents etc etc.
Like, there's all this purpose built accommodation in Dublin that's sitting empty because they want 3k euro for a two bed apartment. For reference, a top 5% taxpayer would clear about 6-8k euro per month, so those prices are entirely out of whack with what people can afford.
But because it's all private capital, it's mark to myth so many of these apartments are empty. I work near the Central Bank, and there's loads of gorgeous six-eight floor blocks of apartments, all of which are entirely empty while we have far too many homeless people.
> Like, there's all this purpose built accommodation in Dublin that's sitting empty because they want 3k euro for a two bed apartment.
Do you have evidence for this, or is it just something you believe? Last I heard, vacancy rates for REIT-owned build-to-lets in Dublin was _extremely_ low, with the exception of exactly one problem building which the media got very excited about a year or so back.
The real question is how that gets defined. We have multiple sources which disagree.
All I can say about my original post is that I've been in that area in the evenings after it gets dark and there's no lights which would seem to suggest that there's no one living there.
Additionally, I've looked in the ground floors of a few blocks and they look as though they've never been occupied.
If you're in Dublin it's well worth going down to the Point when it's dark and counting the number of apartments with lights on.
Thank you for this. It does clearly corroborate that figure of 9%.
Still, 230,000 dwellings of 2,125,000 in total is a lot to be be vacant during an accommodation crisis. As I said elsewhere, the number of vacant dwellings is higher than most would suspect.
Often the issue is where exactly those vacant dwellings are. Typically, booming metro areas will have a low vacancy rate, while the vacancy rate will be high in rural areas or declining cities, where economic prospects are more dubious.
Demand is local. If someone needs to live in Dublin for their work, it doesn't help them much if there's cheap housing a few hours away.
The only two studies I'm aware of that look at this (admittedly from ~10 years ago and for England and the city of Melbourne in Australia) suggest that the proportion of vacant properties is highest where prices and capital gains are greatest. Not intuitive, but that's what they show.
But yes, it would be helpful to see the breakdown of that census data.
Edit: There is actually a breakdown by county if you scroll down the page. Dublin and Cork appear to be at 6 and 7% respectively.
Quite, indeed in London the pressure group "action on empty homes" say it's 2.2% - and that includes second homes (people with a flat in London and a house elsewhere, airbnbs, etc)
That's a tiny number. Even if that number was zero there would still be a massive shortage. Most claims of "homelessness" ignore overcrowding, they're looking at people living on the street, or at most sofa-surfing, they don't look at overcrowded houses, at 30 year old adults with above-average wages who have to share family homes with half a dozen strangers in HMOs.
I don't know about Dublin but I would be surprised if it's not a similar demographic. A lot of cities have a fair amount of airbnbs because they work better for modern travellers than hotels
The biggest places outside the City of London (the square mile in the very middle, it's a special case due to its size) are holiday hotspots like Cornwall, South Devon, the Lake District, where holiday homes, either private or rented out ("airbnbs") make up nearly 10% of the stock.
They also (like action-on-empty-homes) claim airbnbs as "empty", which is a political view. There are about 200k visitors in a given peak summer week to Cornwall [0] and 13k "second homes" [1]. Assuming they are all holiday lets, and lets go for a typical 4 person family, that's 50k visitors. Slash those numbers and that's a hell of a lot of tourists not spending money, and a hell of a lot of jobs not being funded.
On the other hand cornwall could have its total housing stock increased by 5.6% and all the problems would apparently be solved - as there would then be the same number in primary residential use as exist right now.
That's census data, and their collection of data is... imperfect. A lot of those 'vacant' dwellings are one of:
* Occupants refused to engage with census taker (I used to have neighbours who did this; you can theoretically be fined for it but I don't think anyone ever has been)
* Home is in the middle of being sold
* Home is uninhabitable.
* Home is in the literal middle of nowhere.
I'd be in favour of measures to free up vacant housing (punitive tax on vacant housing etc; there _is_ a vacant home tax now but it's pretty small), but I wouldn't hold out much hope of getting a really meaningful amount of housing out of it.
You'd think so, wouldn't you?
However, again the Irish market disproves this to some extent.
So generally you look at rents as a 12-14 year payback window of the house price (for investment). What happened in Ireland in the last decade is that rents increased, such that investors could pay more for houses, which increased rents etc etc.
Like, there's all this purpose built accommodation in Dublin that's sitting empty because they want 3k euro for a two bed apartment. For reference, a top 5% taxpayer would clear about 6-8k euro per month, so those prices are entirely out of whack with what people can afford.
But because it's all private capital, it's mark to myth so many of these apartments are empty. I work near the Central Bank, and there's loads of gorgeous six-eight floor blocks of apartments, all of which are entirely empty while we have far too many homeless people.