Apparently it’s been with Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government Phil Hogan since June 2012, and despite Opposition politicians pestering for its publication, it is only today, after the Budget 2013 announcements that it has finally been published and it is available here. You might also find it useful to consult the Budget 2013 Annex on the property tax published yesterday.
The above table shows some hard data which is apparently based on research work undertaken for the “expert group” – in reality, an interdepartmental group of civil servants with quango-king, Don Thornhill guiding them – by Ireland’s ESRI who have apparently estimated the distribution of property values. The above looks very surprising indeed with just 0.04% of properties estimated to be worth more than €1m and given the estimates earlier in the report of 1.6m eligible homes, that would equate to 640 properties. And if the tax yield at 0.1% was €0.7m, that would mean the 640 homes were worth €700m or €1.1m average each. Doesn’t feel right, but the ESRI research hasn’t been published, but has been requested by here from the Department of the Environment.
The group apparently considered nearly 200 submissions from organizations and individuals. Two recommendations appear not to have been adopted yesterday.
(1) There was a recommendation that for year 1, 2013, local authorities would be able to vary rates by 10%. This transformed to 15% in Budget 2013 but won’t be implemented until 2015
(2) The existing second home tax of €200 was to be added to the property tax, but Minister Noonan says that from 1st January 2014, the second home tax will be replaced by the property tax, which means that 2nd home owners get a benefit when compared with the recommendation in the report.
Why the Government didn’t publish this report for six months remains a curiosity.
UPDATE (1): 7th December 2012. The Government has published what appears to be quite a detailed Property Tax Bill here, and it is understood that the plan is to push it through before Christmas.
UPDATE (2): 7th December 2012. The ESRI report upon which parts of the Thornhill report are based, has been made available and is here.
The first line in the report is an absolute joke. If anyone thinks that only 7.26% of the properties in the country would have a “market value” of under € 100K, they are delusional. The sales prospective for NAMA that is on this site had multiple homes going for less than € 100K.
My guess is that the “real” figure of homes and APARTMENTS under € 100K is a little less than 25%. A lawyer recently told me that no apartment in Dublin is worth more than € 80K. So, there is my valuation….
Based on a quick search on Daft, there are 16,466 homes for sale for less than €100k in Ireland out of a total of 72,656 on offer, i.e 23%. Based on the table above, there are 116,000 homes with a value of less than €100k out of a total of 1.6 mln i.e. a mere 7.3%.
Also, there are 303 homes for sale for more than €1 mln on Daft. On this basis, almost half of all homes in the State worth more than €1 mln (640 as estimated by NWL) are for sale! Very unlikely so there must be far, far more than 640 homes worth over €1 mln even after allowing for inflated asking prices.
@NWL
Certainly would be very interesting to see the ESRI analysis.
@Brian, the figures in the expert report don’t feel right. The yield analysis, extracted and shown at the top of the blogpost, shows 0.04% of homes worth >€1m. Even if that applied to the 2m total dwellings in the state, it would be 800 homes. So the “as estimated by NWL” is really lifted from the report and from the yield analysis. The only variable is the total number of eligible homes which elsewhere in the report is estimated at 1.6m, but even at the absolute maximum, it’s 2m.