New ‘Economics of Property Market’ online course at TCD

There is widespread agreement that Ireland lacks the housing policy expertise to solve its current housing woes. For example, Donal MacManus of the Irish Council of Social Housing made the case recently for third-level education in housing, given the small number of people with accredited housing policy expertise in this country.

To help address this skills gap, Trinity have developed an online course entitled The Economics of the Property Market. It is aimed largely at professionals without any formal training in economics whose work involves property/housing, including valuers, architects, engineers, solicitors and accountants, but is open to anyone with an interest in the property market.

The online course takes place April-June and comprises four sessions, which look separately at: understanding markets; the demand for property; the supply of property; and the economics of property market policy. More information, and a link to sign up for the course, is given at this link:
https://www.tcd.ie/Economics/CPD/index.php

The deadline for registering is Friday April 13th, the course is live on April 30 and all participants are expected to complete the four sessions within six weeks. Those who have further questions can contact me (firstname.surname at tcd.ie).

Housing supply and demand

There is quite a bit of momentum currently – and thankfully, given the severity of the housing crisis – in the whole area of housing, rising prices and rents, and the lack of supply in Ireland’s urban centres. I had thought pretty much everyone involved was agreed that a lack of supply was indeed the root cause of rapidly rising rents and prices.

Hence my despair at reading this article in today’s Irish independent: Easy mortgages for first-time buyers are on the way. Shifting out demand to encourage supply seems to me to be like adding fuel to the fire in the hope that the fire brigade are more likely to turn up. The losers will be the very people the policy aims to help, first-time buyers who will be given more credit to bid against each other.

What is particularly disheartening is that it comes so soon after Ireland tried this before and it went so spectacularly wrong – while house price growth from 1995-2001 was driven by a combination of factors (including incomes growing faster than supply), house price growth 2001-2007 was driven almost exclusively by easy credit and that was where the damage was done.

As per last night’s Prime Time, if you want housing to be affordable, increase supply – it’s no more complicated than that. If supply is not forthcoming, we need to understand why, rather than push the price of housing further up. My suspicion is the current lack of supply is down to a complicated and overly prescriptive system of planning and building controls, coupled with an array of developer contributions and levies which shift the burden from existing to new residents. This could be replaced with a unified land use policy and a simple land value tax.

As for policy in relation to loan-to-value, pick a number (like 80%) as the maximum loan-to-value for anyone and stick with it. That way at least, policy won’t be responsible for turning a house price upswing into another bubble.