Where is the vacant property located?
Or to ask the question a different way, are all the empties located in the ar*e-end of nowhere that you’d never consider living in anyway and only built for section 23 tax-breaks?
To be honest, the only hard vacancy statistics by area are from the 2006 Census plus there are statistics from DEHLG for dwellings built in 2006-2009, and the main use of this blog entry might be to provide a searchable, sortable table of data which can be manipulated as needs be (the other sources available appear to be data in a fixed or picture format which cannot be manipulated). The following links are to word documents with tables. I am working on putting them into Excel but that is proving convulated.
Analysis sorted by County (alphabetical)
Analysis sorted by County (highest number of overall dwellings to lowest)
Analysis sorted by County (highest number of vacancies to lowest)
Analysis sorted by County (highest vacancy rate % to lowest)
Jumping forward from 2006 to the present day there are some 350,000 vacant properties in the State, some of which are holiday homes, some are obsolete (uninhabitable) and the remainder comprise vacancies you would expect at any one time looking over a long period (a standard vacancy rate) and the remainder an exceptional level of vacancy or overhang.
We do know the number of new homes built by Census area but we can only make assumptions as to the occupancy of the new homes and indeed what has happened to the 2006 housing stock.
NIRSA undertook work whereby they established the number of households by Census area in 1996 and again in 2006 (an 11 year period) and then projected that growth for 2006 – 2009 (a 4 year period) by increasing the 2006 household figure by 4/11. In other words assumed that the previous 11 years of growth was a pointer to the following 4 years (another BIG ASSUMPTION). Their results are shown here.
What all of this means is that the seller in Dublin can claim an impending shortage of property in Dublin by making an assumption that the vacancy rate from 2006 to present has dropped in Dublin and he might say urban areas have higher concentrations of public sector workers who have been relatively unaffected by unemployment! And of course the same developer can claim that the 350,000 estimated vacant homes are in the ar*e-end of nowhere by assuming the vacancy rates elsewhere have risen because of emigration following the closure of regional industry. On the other hand the buyer in Dublin can claim vacancy levels have increased and point to construction and retail sectors dying and emigration of Accession migrants who might have been occupied in those sectors. However because the statistics don’t exist both might be talking out of their ar*es.
(Because some bloggers don’t have MS Word on their devices I have been asked to put at least one of the tables in a picture form and I show here the counties sorted by 2006 vacancy rate)
NAMA Wine Lake 