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A 10.6% drop in residential construction in the first three months of the year highlights the ongoing barriers to housing delivery faced by the house building sector.
This decline was reported today by the Central Statistics Office (CSO).
Conor O’Connell, Director of Housing and Planning with the Construction Industry Federation, said:
“The 10% drop in residential construction is further proof of the difficulties that many housebuilders are facing trying to secure the necessary infrastructure to activate sites, the declining availability of both public and private sources of finance for apartment projects and the ongoing challenge of managing cost inflation.
“The decline in the number of planning permissions last year also indicates the difficulty of navigating the planning and legal system to secure the necessary consents.
“This trend is extremely concerning and reinforces the Irish Home Builders’ Association’s (IHBA’s) longstanding position that we need to zone more land, service it with the necessary wastewater infrastructure, electricity connections, transport connections and that we need to find ways of reducing the costs of constructing homes and in particular apartments.
“We welcome recent announcements in relation to the extension of duration provisions for some permissions that were about to expire, as well as changes to the rent pressure zones for new commencements and we understand that more measures are under consideration by Government. The decisions around land zoning, funding for infrastructure, planning and apartment viability need to be considered in the context of the current housing supply crisis.”