How to finance, find and secure a house is becoming an increasing heartache for young couples, and the pain, according to one of Cork's leading house-builders, is likely to get even worse.
The number of homes built by the private sector in Cork has been falling, which will lead to higher prices.
Mr Declan O'Mahony, director of Brideview Developments in Cork, advises first-time buyers is take whatever becomes available to get into the housing pool.
The housing crisis, says Mr O'Mahony, first became acute in Dublin and was then deemed to be a national problem. However, the market forces driving the Dublin market are different from those elsewhere, where regional factors come into play, he says.
Given its population density, Dublin has pressures that need a Dublin response. In the same way, he argues, Cork is different from Limerick, Limerick from Galway. However, all areas have one thing in common. There is a housing shortage in the private sector, demand is outstripping supply and most zoned land has been snapped up.
The crux, according to Mr O'Mahony, is that the Bacon reports, coupled with the new Planning Act, which gives unprecedented land acquisition powers to the local authorities, have created great uncertainty for builders, who are unwilling to invest in new land banks until some certainty returns.
The Construction Industry Federation (CIF) says that to the end of November last year there were 4,228 house starts in Cork, an increase on the 3,922 built in 1999. The comparison, though, doesn't tell the full story. Most of the new homes were begun in the first five months of the year. After that there was a big fall-off in demand as people waited in vain for prices to fall in the hope that Government intervention would kick in.
If the trend continues, what will happen, says the CIF, is that the number of new private-sector houses built in Cork this year will fall below 4,000, whereas the demand will be for between 4,500 and 4,600 homes. That will send prices up.
The number of new private sector apartments built in the city to the end of last year was 525, an increase of only 14 on the previous year. Proof, the CIF adds, that in this sector, too, investors are staying away.
The Bacon reports and the new Planning Act, Mr O'Mahony says, sought to address the demand side without dealing with supply. The biggest issue for builders, he says, is the provision under the new Act that allows local authorities to take up to 20 per cent of land banks acquired by builders and designate it for social and affordable housing.
This provision aimed to prevent land from being held for speculative purposes, but Mr O'Mahony says its effect has been to scare builders away.
"As of now, we don't know how much of the 20 per cent the local authorities will want to take up because it will be some months before their strategic plans for housing have been finalised and published.
"What we do know is that when a local authority decides to take 10, 15 or 20 per cent of the land bank, builders will be compensated at its original use value. In that climate, why would any builder want to borrow money and tie it up in land when he doesn't know how much of that land will be taken over by the local authority?
"The zoned land that was available has been acquired, and if no one is going to be willing to invest in new land, then where are the houses to be built? The crisis is going to deepen, there is no doubt about that," he says.
Mr O'Mahony believes Bacon has failed and the Planning Act, far from easing the housing crisis, has only annoyed the industry.
Bacon placed a limit of two years on planning permissions, causing serious problems for builders involved in large schemes, and imposed a 9 per cent stamp duty on buyers of second homes.
This provision removed a large swathe of people with means who could afford second properties as rental investments, thereby helping to relieve the housing crisis, he says.
Another problem is that over the next few years Ireland will require up to 200,000 extra workers to bolster its labour force. Most of them will come from outside our shores. Mr O'Mahony wonders where they are going to live.
He believes there is scope for the planning regulators to increase the density of sites from the average six houses to the acre to at least double that amount. This would lead to the building industry looking afresh at how houses are designed. The result could be far cheaper houses without compromising green spaces or other amenities, he says.
However, if there is to be a short-term solution, then the building industry, planners, lending institutions and the Government must sit down together to hammer it out, he adds.