Cillian Woods

It's massive money for what...

What traditionally have been seen as maybe a lesser product to a house, especially when you're talking about like whatever about... And what's that, a one, two, three bed for 600k?

That would be a two bed, just a normal size, not a small two bed, just a normal size, regular run-of-the-mill two bed apartment with decent spec because that was considered in the spec for when they were doing that research into how much it would cost to build apartments.

So they were looking at outside of the M50 for not even necessarily a good location, like 550 grand to build an apartment.

The state's Cree Connell scheme was aimed to come in and bring, if we're talking about Dublin, bring the cost down by about 120 grand.

So do the math, that's bringing it down to what they would deem an affordable level of people, or not necessarily affordable, but a price people can afford to pay or would pay, not necessarily affordable, they're very different things.

The problem is that they haven't come in at €90,000 on average.

What we're looking at at the moment is the apartments that have gone through the schemes, €320 million is spent.

That's 70%, roughly 71% of the budget, but we're getting about half the output, €2,600 of the 5,000 apartments.

which means that they're running ahead of budget, as opposed to necessarily that they have completely run over budget, not completely over the £450 million, but they're on track to not be able to fulfil the 5,000 orders.

They're not going to build 5,000 apartments for £450 million.

Which was probably never realistic considering, even if there was modest inflation in the property market, even if there was modest inflation, there was no chance of £500 million back when they announced it in 2022.

It was, and that shows how different, I suppose, how big the changes can be in the property market and how much the raw material prices can go up.

This is a classic case that probably should have been left under review and that maybe that £450 million wasn't ever going to be enough to build enough apartments.

Or it's another case where the government, if I was my own analysis of it, is that they are chasing apartment costs by putting this there.

They are, as opposed to trying to bring the apartment costs down, they're trying to bring the state and the buyers up to the level that that can actually be for to pay the apartments.

Whereas addressing the cost is really what is the underlying issue.

And you can see that there's more of an outright statement for the government at the moment than the state saying,

As they say that in their new housing plan, we're going to try, as opposed to chase prices through incentives, through adding money on to government, stepping in to spend money on apartments or on homes that people can't afford to spend, the bridge of the gap.

They're going to now try and address costs, bringing costs down.