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Joel Keys is a Belfast Loyalist activist and prolific tweeter.
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I discovered a big discrepancy. Well, I didn’t so much discover it as notice it. And it isn’t really isn’t a big discrepancy, it is an enormous discrepancy. A gigantic discrepancy. A sort of a so-big-you-could-see-it-from-space. discrepancy
This is the discrepancy. Have a look at Daft.ie any given day, on the front page you can choose to browse by section, and go to Rental properties. No filters, look at the whole country, any type of residence. Much has been made of this. These days, you will normally get less than 800 properties.
Of course, some properties that go up for rent don’t go on Daft, they are rented by word of mouth, via social media contacts or a postcard in the window of a local shop, but Daft on their website say that 90 per cent of property sales in Ireland are on their site, so it’s a good guess that daft have the bulk of rentals, and movements up and down in their number of listings match the market pretty closely.
Now go to the census results. There were 166,000 vacant properties on census night this year. 166.000.
There have been various attempts to pooh-pooh this figure, but I’ve spoken to the CSO about this and they are very confident in their figure. One reason is because their enumerators visit the property several times before and after census night, talk to neighbours and ask them if anyone lives there, and when someone lived there last.
Also, the enumerators lose pay if a house on their does not return a census form, so they are highly motivated to get it right.
And we have a breakdown of what sort of houses are vacant. 23,000 are vacant because they are undergoing renovation. 27,000 are vacant because the last occupant died. And 35,000 are vacant because they are available to rent.
35,000
Let the figure sink in for a minute. 35,000 homes were vacant, awaiting a tenant. Compare that to less than 800 being listed on Daft.
Those figures don’t overlap, by the way, they were marked down as one category – renovation, occupant deceased or for let, some may fit into two categories, but they are put in one or the other, not both.
So which figure is right? Are there 800 properties to rent in the country or 35,000? You don’t have to spend long in a pub on a Friday night, or on social media to hear stories of the incredible difficulties that home-seekers are experiencing, to know that the 800 figure is the one that is far closer to the truth.
And the market doesn’t lie. Rents have been shooting up, by more than 12 per cent per year. The basic law of supply and demand tells you that there isn’t a huge idle supply out there; if there was, why would desperate would-be tenants be willing to pay ever-increasing rents?
So where in the hell is the CSO getting 35,000 properties to rent from? I called them up and asked, and they were nice enough to talk to me, even give me the odd hint of some of the statistics that aren’t finalised for publication yet.
The first thing is that of all those vacant properties, about 30 per cent of them were recorded as vacant in the 2016 census too; so barring the occasional coincidence, we can conclude that they have been vacant for six years. Think of that – 50,000 homes vacant continuously for the past six years or more, while people are emigrating because they can’t get somewhere to live. People with jobs. People with good jobs, taking the boat because they can’t get a house, not even to rent.
This has led to a lot of abuses in the rental market, and unsurprisingly a lot of legislation to curb those abuses, and demands for even more legislation.
But why would people who own houses – 35,000 houses – previously rented out, not rent them out again when they could it in a heartbeat. I think I know why. They don’t need the money, and they don’t need the hassle.
Property prices are shooting up. These aren’t houses; they’re made of bricks and mortar, they have windows and doors, rooms and a roof, but aren’t’ houses, they are bank accounts, and they are bank accounts that pay 100 times more interest than putting the money on deposit. The owners don’t need extra the cash they would get from rent, and they view the ever-increasing regulations as making renting them out more trouble than it’s worth.
There’s good reason to believe that the well-intentioned laws to protect tenants are contributing to keeping properties off the market. Now, many of these regulations are absolutely required, but they are a two-edged sword. For a major corporate landlord, they are no bother, but for the accidental landlord, it’s a hassle that they don’t need.
And, of course the fact that we have basically no property taxes in Ireland, no penalties at all for vacancy or dereliction means that there is no push factor to get these properties onto the market, so regulation isn’t the only issue here, not by a mile.
But we have an excruciating housing crisis in Ireland, and only a lunatic could imagine that can be resolved without bringing vastly more housing onstream, the right housing in the right places, both new build and existing vacant properties.
Trying to fix it with more regulation, quite likely, is making the situation worse. No regulations will solve the problem without hugely more appropriate supply, and if we have hugely more appropriate supply, most new regulations won’t be needed. That’s the solution to focus on.
