Local authorities have been given individual allocations for the 1,500 tenant-in-situ homes the Government hopes they will purchase this year.
Dublin City Council (DCC) has by far the largest allocation and will be provided with funding to buy 450 homes. South Dublin County Council (150), Fingal County Council (125) and Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown (60) make up an allocation of 785 homes for the capital, more than half the total.
Cork City Council will have funds to buy 80, Limerick city and county 75, and Galway City Council 50 homes.
Cork county (60), Kildare (55), Meath (40), Louth, Kerry and Wicklow (30 each) will have the next-largest allocations.
Waterford and Galway county have 25 each; Wexford, Clare and Tipperary 20 each; Westmeath, Sligo and Donegal 15 each; and all other counties will be able to purchase homes where there is a tenant-in-situ.
The money can be used by local authorities to buy properties where the tenants are on housing assistance payments (HAP) or the rental accommodation scheme (RAS) and the landlords want to sell up.
Each local authority has been given until March 31st to outline its plans for social housing acquisitions for 2023, the number it has completed and the numbers in progress. All acquisitions will have to be added to a database.
Minister for Housing Darragh O’Brien has also requested that reports are provided to the department relating to each individual acquisition of a property with a tenant-in-situ.
The circular sent by the principal officer of the Department of Housing, David Kelly, on behalf of the Minister does not state how much money each local authority will be given to buy housing.
Instead he explained that guidelines around the cost of acquisition of housing will be issued by the department shortly. However, each purchase will require an independent valuation before it is approved.
Mr Kelly said the figures supplied to each local authority were not a target “but rather to support planning and to allow local authorities to prioritise the acquisitions to be targeted”.
The Government is under acute political pressure to increase the social housing supply following the end of the moratorium on evictions from April 1st. It is likely to see a substantial increase in homelessness.
Previous iterations of the tenant-in-situ scheme have provided disappointing results. Just 13 homes were purchased under the scheme between the four Dublin councils last year despite more than 400 properties being offered to the local authorities. A further 382 properties are being examined for possible purchase, of which 92 are described as at “closing” or “sale agreed” stage.
DCC, which has the worst homelessness problem in the State, said it has now purchased 25 homes to date and criticised what it called “negative commentary”. It said the number of homes it has purchased does not reflect the number that are currently in the final stages of being purchased.
In a statement, DCC said that “similar to the purchase of any property, undertaking due diligence can be a lengthy process and, at a given time, the number of completed acquisitions represents only a fraction of purchases in progress”.
Figures from a number of other local authorities across the country show a similarly low number of purchases through the scheme to date.
