So the summer rituals come round. Someone has to ask whether we are beach body ready. Someone has to go to all those inexplicable summer schools.Someone has to stand in for Ryan Tubridy. And someone has to release a report on the property market in Ireland.
The timing here is not a coincidence. In the property business nothing is colder than the month of July. Viewings of properties for sale tail off as soon as the primary school kids get their holidays; and these reports give us something to read on our iPhones when we’re on holiday — often in other people’s houses. After all, the renting of villas and of holiday homes and the advent of Airbnb have combined to show us more of the insides of strangers’ houses than you could shake a colour swatch at.
It is the intimacy of houses, really, which makes them so exciting. Houses are personal; Irish people like personal, and we like emotional. It is amazing how sentimental we are about property. First-time buyers have become the charitable cause of their generation — faceless, blameless victims who deserve only our pity. Say a bad word against first-time buyers, for example, that they are fools to enter a system so stacked against them, and you stand a good chance of being knocked down.
Criticise our property system and you are accused of smugness/callousness/communism. The property ladder is regarded as the sole route to respectability and even to adulthood. Talking about the generation that “will never get on the property ladder” makes us shake our heads in despair. If you’re not on the property ladder you are a lost soul, cast into the outer darkness. No one has ever come back from that to tell us what happens out there.
These property reports are designed to keep us stoked, and they certainly receive maximum publicity.
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The latest report on the housing market, entitled Wealth Report 2017, is sponsored by the property website Daft.ie and informs us that the most expensive place to buy property in Ireland is Sandycove, south Co Dublin. Yes, it is extraordinarily surprising. The cheapest place to buy property is Ballaghaderreen, Co Roscommon. Another shocker.
In Sandycove the average house valuation is €790,000. In Ballaghaderreen the average house valuation is €58,000. The thing is — who cares? If you live in Ballaghaderreen there is little you can do to improve the price of property. If you live in Sandycove you are now assured that you can move out of the area at any time and buy another house elsewhere or 13 average houses in Ballaghaderreen.
The Daft.ie report shows that the rest of the country is holding Dublin back. Our houses would be worth €500,000 if it wasn’t for Longford, where the average house valuation is a measly €117,000. Nationally, the average value of a house is €230,000. So Longford’s got to be dragging us down. There are demands in Dalkey, where most of the €1 million houses are, for a new partition of the country, under which the North can get Longford, Leitrim, Roscommon, Sligo, as well as Cavan and Monaghan — Ulster counties with low house values which they should have been given in the first place — and in return we get the good houses in Belfast, on Cyprus Avenue and the Malone Road.
This would have to drive up the price of houses in Dublin, which as we all know is the main thing. At the moment 1 per cent of homes nationally are worth more than €1 million. This statistic caused Daft.ie, in the writing of its report, to use an exclamation mark, it found the news that exciting. But perhaps I speak for all of us when I say that my reaction is: surely we can do better than that.
The Daft.ie report states that two thirds of Irish people own their own home, and this large percentage of home ownership is often suggested as the explanation for our obsession with the property market. But I believe that the Irish are obsessed with the property market because it is the only form of business we actually understand.
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Either way, the property market is a simple world complicated only by desire, demographics, snobbery and desperation — all of which are pretty easy to identify with and understand, but above all great fun to observe in other people. Talking about property means that we can shout about large sums of money and speculate about the motives of strangers, and about societal change, at the top of our voices, and we don’t often get the chance to do that about anything else. The property world is reassuring for those who own their houses — the vast majority, as we have seen. It is a world where the consumer is the good guy, fighting off evil taxes and duties and unscrupulous rivals and evil bigger traders. It occupies the hidden world of secret Irish money, and in Ireland all private money is secret.
At the same time we don’t seem prepared to do much to help the people in their early thirties who are “failing” to get on the property ladder. And we don’t seem prepared to do much to help people in their late thirties either; they’re the ones who bought when prices were 40 per cent higher and have been living with the consequences ever since.
Surely we need more government intervention here? But then we’re not very good at stuff that isn’t personal. Our banks aren’t good at anything that isn’t personal either, as we have learnt. Yesterday’s newspapers, including this one, revealed that the banks have refilled their coffers by charging the highest mortgage rates in Europe. Irish banks know this single big thing: even the worst crash in the nation’s history has not shaken our obsession with property. Our lust for houses is the safest bet in Europe. Happy days.
I own my house simply because I belong to the generation for whom house buying was easy — in other words, I was lucky. But you look at young people saving every cent they have in order to mortgage their futures away, and you’ve got to wonder: how long is this going to last? A society where all the wealth is in property is essentially a closed, static society. Property is an investment for an individual’s future, but it does not promote anything but social stasis. This goes right back to our ancestors who won the Land War in the 1880s. Michael Davitt himself was unhappy at how the main beneficiaries of the Land War were the already respectable and the propertied. There was no getting on the property ladder for the people Davitt worried about, the landless labourers. It may turn out that for the long-term development of this country property is not the sound investment we assume that it is.