My parents bought their first house in their 30s. It was not a complicated decision. They needed somewhere to live, they could afford it on the income from their business, and they got on with it. That was a normal thing to do in Ireland.

Today, the average first-time buyer in Ireland is 38 or 39 years old. A decade ago, it was 31. The median house price nationally is EUR 387,000. In Dublin, it is EUR 500,000. The price-to-income ratio is sitting at roughly 8:1, double the long-term Irish average and well above the EU norm. Nearly six in ten homes purchased in 2024 were bought by couples, because a single income simply does not cut it anymore. The average household income per transaction is now EUR 84,400.

I have friends back home, good jobs, dual incomes, and they still find it difficult to get on the ladder. They are not doing anything wrong. The maths just does not work for them.

How Did We Get Here?

We let housing become an asset class. That is really the whole story, but the details are worth laying out because people forget how brazen it was.

At the peak in Q1 2019, non-household buyers (institutional investors, REITs, the so-called “cuckoo funds”) accounted for around 20% of all residential property purchases in Ireland. Not people buying homes to live in. Funds buying homes to extract rent from. They concentrated on new apartment developments in Dublin, outbidding first-time buyers with cash offers and bulk-purchasing entire estates before anyone else could even view them.

The damage was structural. When that kind of money floods a housing market, it does not just buy houses, it reprices them. Suddenly the floor is set by yield calculations, not by what a young couple can scrape together for a mortgage.

The private funding model that drove Irish apartment construction from 2018 to 2022 broke down when interest rates rose sharply, making yields unattractive. Institutional investors pulled back hard, forcing the Irish State to effectively become the market’s main financial backer. They have begun selectively re-entering as rates stabilised through 2025, but the dynamic has shifted: the State now underwrites what the private market will not. Meanwhile, the prices institutional money inflated have not come back down. The damage is baked in.

AirBNB is cleaning up

Over 20,000 properties in Ireland are listed as short-term lets on Airbnb. Meanwhile, fewer than 1,800 homes are available for long-term rent nationwide. That is the lowest level since records began. Nine times as many homes on Airbnb as on the entire rental market.

And this is not a handful of people renting out a spare room while they are on holidays. Almost 8,000 entire homes on the platform are operated by hosts with multiple properties. In Dublin, 856 hosts advertise 2,287 properties between them. One couple listed as “private hosts” had 189 live listings. That is not home-sharing. That is a hotel chain without a hotel licence.

So many empty Homes

While all of this is happening, 70,149 homes sit vacant across Ireland. Three percent of all housing stock. In Leitrim, the vacancy rate is 7.8%. In Donegal, 6.3%.

The government introduced a Vacant Homes Tax, now set at 7 times the basic Local Property Tax rate. Sounds aggressive until you look at the numbers: only 2,300 properties are currently liable, generating a grand total of EUR 2.2 million. For context, that is roughly the price of six houses in Dublin.

We built over 36,000 new homes in 2025, the highest since 2011. Economists estimate we need 44,000. But building our way out only works if the homes being built go to people who will actually live in them.

What Other Countries Have Done

Ireland is not the only country dealing with this, but other countries have been far more willing to do something about it.

Singapore imposed a 60% Additional Buyer’s Stamp Duty on foreign buyers in April 2023. Sixty percent. The foreign share of purchases in central Singapore dropped from 15.8% to 8.4% within a single quarter. It is worth noting, though, that 80% of Singaporeans live in HDB flats, State-built housing. The private market the 60% duty applies to is a small, luxury-focused sliver. Singapore can afford to hammer private investors because the State already houses most of the population. Ireland is not even close to that.

Canada banned non-Canadian purchases of residential property entirely in January 2023 and extended it through to 2027.

Denmark requires permanent residence or five consecutive years of living in the country before you can buy property. Even EU citizens generally cannot buy holiday homes. That is about as close as you can get to writing “a house is for living in” into law.

New Zealand banned most foreign purchases of existing homes in 2018, but house prices kept climbing anyway because foreign buyers were only 2-3.5% of the market. The problem was domestic speculation, and banning foreigners did not touch it. Worth remembering when people frame this as purely a “foreign money” problem.

What the Irish Government Is Doing

The government has taken some steps but it’s just not enough. The bulk-buying stamp duty of 10% introduced in 2021 was raised to 15% in October 2024, though apartments were excluded, which is a bit like locking the front door and leaving the back one open. The Help to Buy scheme has been extended to 2030, offering first-time buyers up to EUR 30,000 towards a deposit on a new build.

I understand why Help to Buy is popular. If you are the person using it, it helps. But zoom out and it is a demand-side subsidy in a supply-constrained market. You are giving buyers more money to bid with in a market where there are not enough houses. The extra money gets absorbed into higher prices. The individual wins. The system gets worse.

The Housing for All plan was criticised for removing specific numerical targets. Budget 2026 brought VAT reductions on new apartments (from 13.5% to 9%) and tax incentives for apartment construction. Welcome, but incremental. The Vacant Homes Tax is too weak to force action. The short-term rental regulations lack enforcement. The whole thing feels like a government that understands the problem intellectually but will not do anything that might upset property-owning voters.

So What Would Actually Help?

I am not an economist. I’d just a guy watching from a foreign land and getting increasingly frustrated by what I see happening to people I care about. But some of this is not complicated.

If you own a home you do not live in, you should pay significantly more for the privilege. Not 7 times the LPT. Something that actually changes the calculation on whether it is worth keeping a property empty or listing it on Airbnb instead of renting it long-term. Singapore’s 60% stamp duty is aggressive, but look at the results.

The Airbnb situation is embarrassing. The data is sitting right there on the website. If someone has 189 listings, they are running a commercial operation and should be regulated as one. This is not a mystery that requires further study. It requires enforcement.

Help to Buy should be redirected. Take that money and build social and affordable housing directly. The public sector already purchased 27.5% of new homes in 2024, up from 22% in 2022. That is a start, but it needs to scale dramatically. Vienna is the textbook example: they built public housing at scale, kept it public permanently, and now have one of the most affordable housing markets in Europe.

And the vacancy situation needs to actually cost people something. 70,000 vacant homes during a housing crisis, and the tax generates EUR 2.2 million. Either the tax is too low, the enforcement is too weak, or both. Trick question, it’s both.

The View from Here

I watch this from a distance and I wonder what Ireland will look like in another decade if nothing changes. The average first-time buyer will be in their mid-forties (my age). The price-to-income ratio will be 10:1. The same politicians will be announcing the same incremental measures and calling them ambitious.

Housing is not a complicated problem to understand. People need somewhere to live. If you build enough homes and make it expensive to hoard them, the price comes down. If you do not, it does not. Everything else is detail.

The hard part is that fixing this means making housing less profitable as an investment, and a lot of people who already own property do not want that. That is the actual obstacle. Not supply chains, not planning delays, not construction costs. The obstacle is that the people who benefit from the current system vote.

The government is trying to make housing affordable and make it a good investment at the same time. It punishes bulk-buying with a 15% stamp duty on one hand, then rolls out a 125% corporation tax deduction for apartment construction and cuts VAT on new apartments to 9% with the other. It has billions deployed across the Land Development Agency, the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, and the Housing Finance Agency, all designed to attract institutional capital into housing. The goals of these agencies are not bad. The cost rental model is genuinely trying to deliver affordable homes. But the funding mechanism underneath all of it runs on investment logic, and investment logic needs returns.

The First Home Scheme is the one that really gets me. The State and banks take an equity stake of up to 30% in your home alongside you. It helps you buy a house you cannot otherwise afford, yes. But it also means the State itself is now a property investor, directly benefiting when house prices rise. The government has a financial interest in the very price increases it claims to be fighting.

You cannot simultaneously make housing affordable and make it a good investment. Those goals are in direct conflict. Until someone in government is willing to say that out loud, nothing changes.

My parents bought a house because they needed somewhere to live. That should still be a reasonable thing to do in Ireland. Right now, for a lot of people, it is not.

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