Sign up to The Irish Times Archive (1859 - 2008)My Account »

More precise figures for vacant housing stock outside the Greater Dublin Area are needed to get the planning process back on track, the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI) said today.

Although a number of reports have been published containing figures for the level of empty property around the country, the figures have a disparity of between 17 per cent and 47 per cent.The studies have been carried out by organisations such as NUI Maynooth, Goodbody, UCD and DKM Economic Consultants.

There are believed to be between 352,414 and 301,682 vacant houses in Ireland. Estimates for holiday homes range between 49,789 and 73,476. There are about 1.9 million houses in the State in total.

Director of the RIAI John Graby called for the Department of the Environment to task local authorities to undertake a count of the housing stock to establish how many homes are currently unoccupied.

“The uncertainty and lack of authoritative data on the country’s housing stock needs to be resolved to get a proper planning process going,” he said.

He suggested that unemployed construction industry professionals could compile the data while claiming jobseekers allowance.

More than 18 per cent of the State’s houses could be lying vacant at present, compared to 7.3 per cent in Europe and 3.4 per cent in the UK.

“These various reports show that there is clear lack of unanimity on the size of the national housing stock and the overhang of vacant property in the State. Nobody knows exactly how many houses in Ireland are occupied or empty, what kinds of houses they are, where exactly they are, what state they are in, how many are derelict or even how many holiday homes there are. If we don’t know what we have we won’t know what we need,” Mr Graby said.

In a separate report, Jones Lang LaSalle said there were indicators of a positive turnaround in the Dublin office market, as tenant demand rose 40 per cent in the first quarter of 2010.

However, the vacancy rate remains unchanged, the report said, at 22 per cent. The lowest vacancy rate in the city is in Dublin 2 at 15 per cent, ahead of the overall city centre at 20 per cent and 25 per cent in suburban markets.

“The drop in prime rental values for Dublin offices during 2009 combined with increasing levels of incentives being offered to tenants have made the city more competitive to prospective occupiers and helped drive the increased tenant demand for Dublin offices in Q1 2010” said Jones Lang LaSalle’s Fionnuala O’Buachalla.

Meanwhile, the Dublin Office Service Charge Annual Report (Oscar) found that average service charge levels in the capital had fallen 13 per cent from the end of 2008 to €62.85 per m2.

Heating and airconditioning remain the most expensive components of the overall service charge, at €10.89 per sq m, while power and light costs €10.36 per sq m.