A third of homes ‘built’ since 2011 don’t exist

First we had ghost estates, now it’s phantom houses — one in three of all the new homes thought to have been built over the past seven years never existed.

Some 85,154 new houses and apartments were calculated to have been built from 2011 to 2017, but the true number was 53,566 — just 63% of what was believed.

The Central Statistics Office (CSO) uncovered the disparities after being asked by Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy to come up with a more accurate method of counting new builds than the one used by the Government for the last 40 years.