Ronan Lyons | Personal Website
Ronan Lyons | Personal Website

rents

Time to view students as people too

Last month, the latest Daft.ie Rental Report showed just how bad the market is for today’s renters. Rents are now up by 70% in Dublin from their lowest point, in late 2010, while elsewhere in the country they have risen by 45% on average – although this hides significant variation by county.

Not only do rents continue to increase, they are doing so at a faster rate: for the fifth quarter in a row, rents rose by at least 10% year-on-year. It would be a brave civil servant who would argue that Rent Pressure Zones are working.

As ever, prices are just a symptom, though. The underlying cause is a lack of supply. There were fewer than 3,000 properties available to rent nationwide on the 1st of August this year. That’s not only down almost 20% on the same date a year earlier, it’s also the first time ever that fewer than 3,000 homes have been available to rent.

The last time the rental market was experiencing anything like this was in early 2007, when rents were increasing at roughly 11% per year. Even then, though, there was an average of 4,800 properties available to rent at any one time – roughly half those in Dublin.

Now, though, availability in Dublin is close to 1,000. Comparisons with ten years ago also understate the issue: the number of people renting has risen by more than 50%. If 5,000 homes to rent was a tight market 10 years ago, the equivalent tightness today would be 7,500.

This sort of rental crisis is unprecedented and is clearly linked to the homelessness crisis. Healthy housing markets are built on a number of key ingredients. One of these is the presence sensible mortgage rules, which we had through the Building Society system from the 1860s until the late 1980s, and again since the Central Bank rules came in in 2015.

A second key ingredient is a responsive social housing sector. Ireland had this more or less from independence – but it was dismantled steadily from the 1980s on. By the mid-2000s, loose lending was taking the place of social housing.

But we know have a combination of mortgage rules but no social housing. Never before in postwar Ireland have we had this combination, which is what makes the homelessness crisis so severe.

Into this environment step our fledgling households, those starting college for the first time this month. What chance do they have? Many students are already choosing not to study in Dublin, even if a course there offered them the best prospects, because of the cost or the lack of a home. Many more are commuting very long distances to try to make things work.

As a society, we should be happy with neither of these as solutions. Even leaving aside the potential for higher education as a lucrative export industry, we should be trying to ensure that our students have the supports necessary to fulfil their potential.

What is obvious from a quick glance at the figures is that we are failing them, particularly when it comes to their accommodation. In the UK, roughly half of all students who don’t live with their parents live in purpose-built student accommodation, either on- or off-campus.

In Ireland, roughly 35% of students – rather than the 10% seen in the UK – live at home with Mammy. Of the remainder, only a small fraction– a little more than 10% – live in purpose-built student accommodation. This of course puts pressure on the wider rental sector, as students group up and take family homes out of circulation.

What is truly frightening for me, as an outside observer, is how ill-prepared our policymaking system is for the future. We know from demographics that the number of third-level students is set to grow by at least 50% over the coming decade. Factoring in likely increases in enrolment and in net migration, as well as the targeted increase in non-EU students, student numbers in Ireland may double over the coming 15 years.

Suppose we allow for one third of Irish students to stay with Mammy. Even reaching the UK ratio of one student in purpose-built for every student in the wider rental sector would mean a dramatic increase in purpose-built student housing over the coming decade.

The country needs to plan for having 100,000 units in purpose-built student accommodation by 2025. It currently has about one third of that. Put in its simplest terms, Dublin needs to be seeing a new block of 300 student beds opening every months for a decade – while the rest of the country (as a whole) needs to see roughly the same.

But with Dublin City Council already trying to change the rules to make it easier to say no to proposals for student beds, what are the odds that this will happen? Sadly, unless a change in mindset happens fast, we are likely to read grim news on student housing and the rental sector for some years to come.

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An edited version of this post was originally published in my column in the Sunday Independent.

Construction, not rent control, the solution to the housing crisis

Today sees the publication of the latest Daft.ie Rental Report. The full report is available here, while below are my thoughts on what the latest report tells us.

Most analysis of the housing market – both sales and rental – is currently done through the lens of the last housing bubble and where it was when it burst in 2007. However, that is a point of view that is increasingly out of date. In the rental market, for example, rents bottomed out in Dublin and Cork cities in late 2010 and had actually bottomed out a year earlier in Galway city. Ireland’s urban centres are four years into a new housing market cycle – and yet there is still very little evidence that anything is being done about what is now a chronic shortage of accommodation in Irish cities.

With local and European elections just a couple of weeks away, a number of candidates – particularly in the Dublin constituency – have been talking about rent control as a necessary remedy for the ills of rising rents. However, while the desire to simply make illegal what you don’t like is understandable, it mistakes the symptom for the underlying disease.

On the one hand, tenants already have reasonable security of tenure. Since the Residential Tenancies Act 2004, once a 6-month probationary period has been passed, tenants have security of tenure in four-year cycles, something that is known as a “Part 4 Tenancy”. (To ensure this is the case, tenants who have signed one-year leases need to notify their landlord about their intention to stay – more here.) There are a certain number of conditions under which a landlord can terminate a tenancy, but getting higher-paying tenants is not one of these.

On the other hand, rising rents are caused by a lack of accommodation in urban centres and reducing rents will discourage the provision of new accommodation, thereby making the problem worse. What we have seen in both sales and rental markets is reasonably robust demand for accommodation in Dublin and other cities, which has pushed up both rents and prices. These should be acting as a signal to bring about new supply – so why has significant new building not started in Ireland’s cities?

Whether construction of new homes takes place depends on whether revenues exceed costs. Revenues come from rents and house prices, which both appear to be at the cusp of affordability given incomes in Ireland. Therefore, if rents and prices are high enough, the solution is about reducing costs in construction – not about capping rents and thus further discouraging the very construction that would alleviate the accommodation crisis.

The cost base in construction includes capital, labour, land and regulation, as well as materials, whose prices are typically set on world markets. What is needed now is for the Government to go through each element in the cost base and develop actions to lower costs. It may surprise some readers to learn that the cost of building a house is 3.3% higher now than in 2007.

Labour costs in construction fell once, in March 2011, when hourly rates were reduced by 7.5%. But in an economy where the average disposable income fell by 25% between 2006 and 2012, and where there are significant numbers of long-term unemployed construction workers, is that enough? More importantly, the minimum hourly rate for a basic operative in Ireland at €13.77 remains a quarter higher than in West Germany (€11.05, a figure which will rise to €11.30 by 2017). Department of Environment figures indicate that for every €1 of materials, €2 is paid in wages, so the wage rate in construction has a real effect on levels of construction.

Just as important is the cost and supply of land. If people are allowed to hoard land or sit on derelict or vacant sites, this imposes a cost on the rest of society. Dublin City Council’s proposed levy on derelict and vacant sites may help encourage unused land to be used, but it can do nothing to encourage land to be used better and its biggest effect may be just a clamour to have some activity – any activity – on these sites to avoid tax.

Related to this, various levels of government currently deploy a bewildering array of planning and building regulations and charges, each of which increases the cost of building. While standards of quality should not be sacrificed for political expediency, many of the regulations – such as minimum sizes – appear to very little connection to quality and instead look like the preferences of planners and policymakers trumping those of households.

How the system currently treats land and planning regulations needs, at the very least, to be streamlined. Overhauling a dated and complicated system of stamp duties, development levies, commercial and industrial rates and amenity contributions, not to mention the Local Property Tax, with a single unified Site Value Tax is clearly the best solution to join up the very disjointed Government system that underpins Ireland’s construction sector.

The Government’s new strategy for the construction sector will be published shortly. No dobut the headline measures will relate to capital, with a fund for construction projects or targets for the pillar banks featuring prominently. But capital is only one part of the puzzle. Labour, land and regulation are just as important. It is to be hoped that the new strategy will contain specific measures to lower the cost of both labour and land, as well as streamline the Byzantine system of planning and building regulations. Only a holistic approach will be good enough if Ireland’s latest housing crisis is to be stopped.

Time to face reality, as rents start to rise for family homes

The latest Daft.ie Rental Report, released today, found that rents nationally rose in the third quarter, for the first time since early 2008. The urban-rural difference in trends persists, though. This post looks at trends by bedroom number, finding rising rents for family homes in most urban segments. A persistence in thinking about one national property market, however, will prevent the response required to keep an adequate supply of competitively priced accommodation. Read more

Rents stabilise during the first months of 2010

This post reviews the latest Daft Report, on the rental market in Q1 2010, released this morning. Overall, it finds that rents have been stabilising, particularly in the city areas. The market remains fragile, though, with the total number of properties available to rent outside the main cities well above the number of monthly transactions. The post finishes by looking at what’s happened the dishwasher premium over the course of the recession. Read more

Is it cheaper to buy or rent?

In this post, I take a look at the maths behind buying or renting. Amazingly, even in heady market of 2006, it was cheaper to buy than rent. With rates back down at very low rates, and generous mortgage interest relief, it is once again cheaper to buy than rent – and looks set to stay that way, unless there are significant changes to the tax system. Read more

Hair of the dog: With rents fallings, ECB cuts the only thing likely to drag yields above borrowing cost

The third and final (for 2008 anyway) instalment in the visualizations of Ireland’s property market takes a different look again to my recent posts on trends in prices and stock. Building on the measure of affordability on page 10 of each daft.ie rental report and a suggestion made on thepropertypin.com, it measures the gap between the expected yield and the cost of borrowing.

The result is here on Manyeyes. Blue means the cost of borrowing is greater than the expected yield, while brown means the opposite. Below, two quarters are shown – 2008 q3 and an estimate for 2009 q2.

The gap between the cost of borrowing and property yields in Ireland, 2008 q3 and an estimate for 2009 q2
The gap between the cost of borrowing and property yields in Ireland, 2008 q3 and an estimate for 2009 q2

What is clear is if that one takes a measure of this gap as a measure of market disequilibrium, the market remains overpriced. (There are of course plenty of reasons why rents as a proportion of house prices may not be the only measure of a housing market in balance, particularly where rental markets are small or negligible, but bearing that in mind, let’s proceed…)

To look ahead and see if this mass of blue is likely to change any time soon, I made some assumptions about interest rates, asking prices and rents, based on what we know now. I assumed that interest rates fall to 1.5% in June 2009, and that house prices and rents both fall 5% quarter-on-quarter in the first six months of next year, as high levels of stock in both segments take their toll. I’ve also assumed landlords will still get 11 months of the 12 in rent and that the rate at which first-time buyers borrow remains about 1.1% above the ECB rate.

I’m sure there are plenty of ways people might disagree with particular aspects of those assumptions, but I think they make, if nothing, else a starting point for discussion. (Take them as a straw man if you don’t like them!) Anyway, if those assumptions were to be borne true over the coming six months, the first thing to note is that yields would be largely unaffected – i.e. not going in the direction they should be, up towards the equilibrium long-term average cost of borrowing somewhere north of 4%. (It should be pointed out at this stage that yields in certain market segments, e.g. West Dublin 1-beds, are already very close to 5%, so averages certainly hide some interesting sub-county variations. For more check out page 10 of the last Daft.ie report.)

However, a collapse in interest rate – albeit gradually – in a steady-as-she-goes ECB version of the Fed’s record peak to trough interest rate journey would have the not unexpected consequence of turning all those blue spots brown. Well, most of them anyway. Once again, the prognosis is not good for Leitrim and Cavan, two of the counties with among the worst stock overhang in the country, on a per capita basis. Even with interest rates collapsing to record lows, that would not be enough to make the rate of return on property greater than the cost of borrowing.

Is the cure the world is adopting a central banker’s version of the hair of the dog that bit you? Or are we entering a phase of the world economy where caution is so predominant that low interest rates are the appropriate response?