Construction slump eases as new building rates rise across 11 counties

THE slump in new building may be slowing, according to number-crunching figures released by An Post subsidiary GeoDirectory.

It says that new building rates have picked up in 11 out of 26 Irish counties so far this year.

Bucking the downward spiral, 7,330 new residential and commercial buildings have been identified in the first six months of 2011. Although that’s a 10% drop from a year ago, the rate of fall is less than previous years, when 40%, 49% and 57% drops were recorded in 2010, 2009 and 2008, respectively.

Building peak activity was in the first half of 2007 when 60,781 new buildings were added to the GeoDirectory database. There’s been a drop of 88% in total since then.

The east and south-east showed most recovery and actual growth, with Limerick joining counties like Waterford, Carlow, Cavan, Dublin, Kildare, Kilkenny, Laois, Meath, Offaly and Wicklow moving to growth over 2010 levels.

According to GeoDirectory, the average increase in new building activity in these 11 counties was 41% with the largest increase of 80% recorded in Meath, where 182 new buildings were identified.

Overall, the largest number of new buildings was in Ireland’s largest county, Cork, with 825 new builds, ahead of next highest, Dublin at 715. However, new building in Cork city and county was down 34% compared with the same half-year period in 2010.

Co Leitrim, which has Ireland’s highest rate of unoccupied buildings, had the largest decrease in new buildings, down 68% with just 30 new buildings recorded in the first half of 2011.

Of the 7,330 new buildings recorded nationally, 6,221 were residential buildings, 932 were commercial buildings, and 177 were dual-purpose.

It brings the total number of identified buildings in the entire country to 1,883,474, and the database (which is updated every quarter) is used by the emergency services, pizza delivery companies, property websites, local authorities, utility and insurance companies, etc.

GeoDirectory’s survey is carried out by 5,600 post office workers, with Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSi) input.