Number of housing sites with nothing done since filing of commencement notice trebles

As part of Government measures to boost supply, there were two waiver schemes to incentivise developers to lodge commencement notices for housing. File photo: Sasko Lazarov/© RollingNews.ie

The number of housing sites where no building works had started despite a commencement notice being lodged has almost trebled, the Department of Finance has said.

In a paper on economic insights for the third quarter of this year, the department said using commencement notices — a formal notification that construction is set to begin — to forecast how many homes will be built should be “revisited”.

Despite over 69,000 commencement notices being filed last year, it is likely the number of new homes completed this year will be around half of that number.

“The analysis suggests that the slowdown in delivery observed to date is at least partially explained by some projects not being under active construction,” the Department of Finance said.

In previous years, it said that once a commencement notice is submitted, a housing unit is delivered within 12 months for a house and 18 months for an apartment.

As part of Government measures to boost supply, there were two waiver schemes to incentivise developers to lodge commencement notices for housing, and the analysis suggests they resulted in “three record months where the highest ever number of monthly commencements occurred”.

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However, while designed to incentivise housing, the measures which led to a significant number of commencement notices hasn’t led to a corresponding increase in housing availability.

The Department of Finance said: “The record volume of notices during the year raises questions around whether the construction sector can translate these commencements into completed units as efficiently as they have in the past.

“In 2025 to date, there are c.16,000 fewer completions than would have been anticipated using historic conversion rates.” 

It said the translation of commencements into completions was “markedly slower” in 2024. It highlighted data from local authority inspections, where councils visited sites of 12% of the new buildings for which commencement notices were notified in 2024 in early 2025.

“While an increase in the absolute number of units not commenced might be expected given the increase in overall commencements, the proportion not commenced also increased markedly by around 8 percentage points in 2024 to 14%, or almost three times the average of recent years’ figures,” it said.

It concluded that some of the developments associated with the waiver schemes have not yet materialised into construction activity.

Government housing plan

It comes as the Government’s new housing plan announced last week abandoned yearly targets for homes built, as it missed last year’s and appeared set to miss this year’s target by a significant margin.

Speaking at the plan’s launch, Taoiseach Micheál Martin said the Government was determined to “do whatever it takes” to solve the housing crisis.

Separately, the Department of Finance also pointed to developments in the construction sector in its analysis. It said that with Ireland’s ambitious infrastructure targets, domestic labour alone “won’t be enough to bridge” the workforce shortages in the sector.

“At least in the short term, foreign labour will be essential,” it said. “There is, however, clearly a balance to be struck between utilising foreign labour to fill skills shortages, and not undermining domestic efforts to increase supply."