2025 Ireland Spotlight
The past few months have seen some important changes to the backdrop for Ireland’s housing markets. The New Programme for Government has set revised targets for home delivery (300,000 new homes by 2030) which now at least more accurately reflect the current realities of housing demand.
However, housing supply remains below what is required from a demand perspective and in the short term it is difficult to envisage a significant closing of that gap. Important indicators of future housing completions such as planning permissions and commencements are currently giving mixed signals about the short-term direction for completions.
On balance though, we believe that the near doubling in housing starts in 2024 (helped by a last minute developer rush to avail of development levy waivers and water charge rebates) should ultimately support an improvement in supply over the next number of years. We anticipate that near term supply growth will be quite gradual with housing completion numbers more likely to be in the 35,000-40,000 range in the next couple of years, higher than in recent years but still below most estimates of housing demand.
