Irish Examiner View: Improvement  still awaited on housing problem

 Also heard this week were new proposals which Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien wants included in guidelines for planning authorities, such as a reduction in garden sizes and possible elimination of car parking spaces in new developments.
Picture:Conor McCabe

The biggest fall in house prices in a decade was always likely to attract headlines, and so it proved when the findings of the latest daft.ie report were published.

Those findings caught the eye, when stating that house prices fell nationally by an average of 0.3% in the first quarter of this year, the biggest drop in price since the first three months of 2012.

As ever with such reports, the devil was in the detail. 

For instance, one area in particular didn’t see prices fall in the latest analysis — the Munster region, where prices actually rose by 0.6% in the three months to March, a significant difference when compared to the national average.

The report also demonstrated how quickly the situation has changed even across a span of three to four years. In the first quarter of this year, the number of homes for sale rose by 30% compared to the same time last year.

There were 13,100 properties available to buy on March 1, which seems encouraging at first glance — but that figure is far below the pre-covid average. In 2019 it was almost twice as high, at 24,000.

Because this is housing, the picture was immediately complicated by parallel developments. That contrast in the number of houses for sale is even starker when considered alongside the much-publicised Land Development Agency report, also issued this week. 

From that we learned that though it was possible 67,000 homes could be built on 83 plots of public land over the next 15 to 20 years, fewer than 10,000 of those homes are deliverable within the “near term”, or within five years.

This was followed in turn by new proposals which Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien wants included in updated guidelines for planning authorities: they include a reduction in garden sizes and the possible elimination of car parking spaces in new developments.

Another week in Irish housing, which means another series of loosely-connected yet interdependent events. And no closer to an improvement.