A county-level perspective on housing affordability in Ireland. ESRI Research Notes 2019/4/2

Allen-Coghlan, Matthew and Judge, Conor and O’Toole, Conor and Slaymaker, Rachel (2019) A county-level perspective on housing affordability in Ireland. ESRI Research Notes 2019/4/2. UNSPECIFIED.

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Abstract

The issue of housing affordability in Ireland has come to the fore in recent years as house prices have increased significantly following the recovery. In a recent survey, Corrigan et al. (2019a) find that 86.5 per cent of renters expressed a preference for homeownership. However, rising house prices have led to serious concerns about the ability of first time buyers (FTB) to enter the housing market. This group has been cited as one particular pressure point in recent assessments of market affordability (Housing Agency, 2017). Analysis published in the ESRI Quarterly Economic Commentary (McQuinn et al., 2018) finds that house price growth has been uneven across the distribution, with cheaper properties growing at faster rates than more expensive properties. This is likely to further exacerbate the affordability concerns of first time buyers, who typically enter the housing market at lower house price levels than second and subsequent borrowers.

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