Changing profile of new home buyers as demand soars
Janeville in Carrigaline, Co Cork which is delivering 950 homes over a decade-long time span.
Just 5,000 Irish people were able to buy their own home last year, the new president of the Construction Industry Federation has calculated.
Shifts in the Irish home building sector over the past 20 years have been starkly outlined by veteran builder Stephen McCarthy, as he steps into a high profile with CIF, the representative body for builders.
Stephen has over 50 years’ experience in the sector, with thousands of homes delivered and is currently on site in one of Munster’s biggest and ongoing developments, Janeville in Carrigaline, delivering a whopping 950 homes over a decade-long time span.
Yet, taking the long view, Mr McCarthy acknowledged the change in the profile of who can afford to provide and to buy houses in Ireland.
He is a past chair of Homebond, and of the Irish House Builders Association, and was one of the few home builders to stay on site consistently after ‘the crash’, working through Nama and out the other side with his company (Astra Construction, 34 years trading): he’s a straight talker, shoots from the hip and from the lip.
Stephen McCarthy deftly crunched output numbers at a 90th anniversary of the CIF in Cork last week, in front of almost 300 in the professions and others in the various construction trades, including local and government representatives.
Back at ‘the boom’ the industry managed housing output of up to 90,000 units, Mr McCarthy noted. “Now it’s 30,000, and this year we’ll be lucky to reach the same, if not less,” he forecast glumly.
Of that 90,000 output, he reckoned that 90%, or 80% were for individual buyers “so about 65,000 or 70,000 private houses were being built in the country.
“Today, out of 30,000 units, if we take out the ‘one-off’ houses, if we take out social and affordable housing, take out cost rental and all of these things, there are less than 10,000 houses being built in the country.
“And, as we are all aware today, the amount of new Irish buying houses now, price rental, is keeping us all in a job, so that the actual real numbers of Irish citizens buying houses at the moment is less than 5,000 houses in the whole country. It’s very frustrating for young buyers.
“Reading that figure to me is the real figure of the scale of the problem in this country: 5,000 Irish people this year can afford to buy a private house,” Mr McCarthy asserts.
The new Government has a short window to get to grips with house crisis, the new CIF President said, giving them six to nine months to take some drastic action “because in all reality no matter what they do this year they will see no improvement in the situation for another, 12, 18 months, for two years,” he said, declaring “there’s no short-term fix.”
Mr McCarthy said builders welcomed the word from Government that they wanted to engage, have honest conversations and work in partnership with the building industry to hit targets of 300,000 new homes (by 2030) and hit outturns of c 50,000 units per year: “May I say, it’s not before time, because for so long there was a sense of frustration in the industry, of knocking your head against the wall.”
The 2025 CIF president Mr McCarthy called for accountability, for dealing with facts and figures: “we must be the greatest country in the world for making plans, long term, short term, all kinds of plans, but there never seems to be a check list as to how the plan worked out, so there’s no accountability.
“It sounds wonderful, making plans. No good, nothing happens, because at the end of the day it’s all about production. Build houses, build infrastructure, get things done. Talk is cheap, action is what it’s all about.”
Meanwhile, at the same event, incoming Cork CIF Branch chair, Cian O’Mahony, outlined points for collaborative action between Government and the construction industry (which employs 176,000 directly, up 4% for 2023) — adopting modern methods of construction( MMC), promoting offsite manufacturing and embracing Building Information Modelling (BIM) while the State to needs to: eliminate bottlenecks in planning and services; enhance the country’s infrastructure, especially water; efficiently zone and service residential lands, with continuous multiannual investment in infrastructure and have state bodies to expedite infrastructure development on zoned lands so that they are serviceable and accessible.
Tellingly, Mr O’Mahony noted “currently, there are nearly 20,000 planning units that are awaiting decision under the SHD planning process for close on two years. This process was originally supposed to take 16 weeks …”
“Prompt decisions on these applications will provide a substantial and immediate increase in housing supply,” said Mr O’Mahony adding that Government initiatives such as Project Tosaigh and Croi Conaithe and schemes such as ongoing Cost Rental, Help to Buy and First Home Schemes “are playing a crucial role in driving housing supply. These initiatives need to stay in place and if and where possible continue to improve.”
