The lack of homes available for sale in Ireland is “unprecedented in the era of online advertising”, according to property website Daft.ie.
The latest Daft House Price Report shows that average prices have surged 8.4% since this time last year – and 2.4% in the last three months.
The increases are smaller in urban counties than in rural areas - with Dublin, Cork and Galway seeing rises of around 4% over the last 12 months.
In limerick and Waterford meanwhile, the increases 7.6% and 9.3% respectively.
Supply remains a major issue for the housing market – with just 10,000 homes listed for sale on March 1st.
On Newstalk Breakfast this morning, Trinity economist and report author Ronan Lyons said that previous reports have seen up to five times more houses on the market.
“If you look at 2019, across the country as a whole there were about 25,000 properties on the market and if you and I had a conversation then, I would have called it a very tight market, compared to what had come in the previous few years when there would have been 30,000, 40,000 or even 50,000 homes on the market,” he said.
“But since then, it gone down from 25,000 to just 10,000 and that is just unprecedented in the era of online advertising.
“This is the number of homes for sale online and we can go back to 2006 when online advertising arose and there is nothing like that.
“So, we are in as bad a place in terms of supply as we have been relative to demand over the last 15 years unfortunately.”
House prices have increased by 8.4% in one year
Check out the full Daft Q1 2022 House Price Report for more details https://t.co/Au8xcKosZf pic.twitter.com/Lanh8ZW02y— Daft.ie (@daftmedia) March 28, 2022
He said the year-on-year price increases is ‘huge’ – especially when you consider “this has happened consistently over the last six or seven years”.
Mr Lyons said housing supply can be increased through new builds and second-hand sales – both of which are being impacted by global events.
He said the COVID pandemic is having a lasting effect on the second-hand market with 15% fewer homes being listed at any point in time.
“It is recovering but it is recovering slowly rather than quickly so the second-hand market is only gradually going to get back to what it was pre-COVID,” he said.
“That, I think, is just because of the nature of putting your home up for sale and finding somewhere else.”
New-builds
He said more new-builds are getting started now than at any point in the last 15 years – but the war in Ukraine is now adding “further disruption and uncertainty in supply chains”.
“What that means is, for people trying to get materials, they are harder to get and more expensive and that makes building homes less attractive,” he said.
“Therefore, we may see some downside risk in terms of the number of homes we build. As a country we need 40,000 to 50,000 homes built a year for decades and we are struggling at about 20,000, at the moment.”
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