Of all the rabbit holes we’ve gone down on housing, the vacant property narrative might qualify as the most pointless.
It started in 2017 when the Central Statistics Office (CSO) published census data indicating that there were 183,312 homes (not counting 62,148 holiday homes) classified as being “vacant”.
This equated to a national vacancy rate – the number of empty or idle properties as a proportion of total housing stock – of 9.1 per cent, which, at the time, was the 10th highest in the world.
The finding quickly bled into the notion that there was a clique of rich people sitting on empty properties while the rest of the State boiled in a bath of soaring rents and property prices.
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The then government promised action in the form of a vacant property tax.
But the idea that we have thousands of these vacant properties ready to be leveraged back into the system has been debunked time and time again. The CSO’s definition of vacancy, for census purposes, was much looser than campaigners had bargained for.
A large chunk of the homes captured by enumerators were only temporarily vacant either because the occupiers were on holiday, owners were temporarily absent for medical reasons, the property was being refurbished, was in the process of being let or was tied up in probate.
Safe to say there were a number of legitimate reasons for the owners of these properties not to be there on census night.
Pioneered in Australia
This week, the CSO published a separate report that used ESB data and electricity consumption as a measure of vacancy, a method that has been pioneered in Australia.
Electricity consumption is a clever way of telling if a dwelling is inactive or showing no sign of recent use.
Specifically, the CSO’s report measured the number of dwellings that consumed less than 180kWh (kilowatt-hours) of electricity “for at least four consecutive quarters”.
For context, 2kWh consumption is enough to power a medium-sized fridge for a day.
It found that there were just 70,149 dwellings (including holiday homes) in the Republic which consumed “very low levels of electricity”. This equated to national vacancy rate of 3.2 per cent.
As you would expect, the rural vacancy rate was higher (5.4 per cent) while the urban vacancy rate was lower (2.2 per cent). The local authorities with the highest vacancy rates were Leitrim (7.8 per cent), Donegal (6.3 per cent) and Mayo (6 per cent).
In contrast, much lower vacancy rates were found in south Dublin (0.9 per cent), Fingal (1.1 per cent) and Kildare (1.4 per cent).
A vacancy rate of between 2.5 per cent and 6 per cent is considered normal in a properly functioning housing market.
All of which goes to show that the State does not have this low-hanging fruit of vacant properties waiting to be rerouted back into the system.
But we’ve exhausted a significant amount of political and administrative capital to find this out.
Back in 2022, the Revenue published its own analysis, finding that just 57,206 properties were indicated by their owners as being vacant as of November 1st, 2021. That also gave a vacancy rate of 3.2 per cent.
But this went largely unnoticed.
And what of the vacant homes tax (introduced as part of Budget 2023)? As of July last year, about 2,300 properties out of the total housing stock of 2.3 million were liable to pay it, netting the exchequer a grand total of €2.2 million annually.
The Government’s revamped housing plan still targets a reduction in residential vacancy, and the provision of detailed data to assist in this objective.
“Metered electricity consumption data in Ireland is collected by a single organisation (ESB Networks), which enhances its capacity to deliver insights into housing occupancy and vacancy levels in the State,” the CSO said.
In its report, it noted that using electricity data to proxy dwelling level occupancy has been used by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The Australian agency found that – in June 2021 – there were up to 136,000 dwellings sitting unused across Australia.
This finding also debunked the widely reported idea over there that the country had more than one million vacant homes, a number that had also been derived from a misinterpretation of the census data.
The Australian agency built its snapshot of vacancy from several administrative sources, including a register of all known physical addresses in Australia, information on income and taxation, and electricity consumption data.
In Ireland, we do have thousands of people living in half empty properties who cannot downsize which is not an optimal use of the existing stock. We also have thousands of above-store properties and/or derelict commercial properties that could, in theory, be renovated for residential use.
But the vacant property narrative here, and the tax income that it can yield, falls into the category of something that sounds good, that will play well politically, but that actually delivers nothing.
It is a dead end.
