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Why Ireland's housing bubble burst

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Re: Why Ireland's housing bubble burst

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it does. You're assuming that the median person's income should be affording the median home price. But that's incorrect because it doesn't take into account peoples' existing asset values. Again, if most people have 300k home assets, and then recently high income people competitively outbid each other to raise those assets to 600k prices, only the high income people were attempting to buy a small % of the homes.…

> in a country where a household income of 100k puts you in the top 10%. Note this point I made. If we assume that I earn 100k, and have no house. I have savings of 50k, and want to buy a house. I can buy a house of 450k, four times my income plus my savings. If I (theoretical I, at least) cannot afford the median (i.e. 50% of properties sell for more than this price) price in basically half of Dublin (not a small, c…

> then something seems off with the market

That, there is no debate.

> what's happening in the irish property market.

This is happening in many countries' property markets, including the US, Canada, UK, Australia, etc.

Two monetary factors can be used to purchase a house: income and wealth. You are assuming income should the only factor at play (it ought to be, but it is not), but not realizing that wealth is also used. The problem is that houses are now treated as a wealth asset, like a stock, with the expectations of 5-10% YoY growth, so there is an enormous appetite for dumping large savings/wealth into them.

> This won't raise the median price to 600k, it will take way more sales to shift the median (if we're talking about the mean then this is more likely).

Do you price a stock based on the median transaction of the last 10 years? No, because they are usually increasing in value. The most recent transactions provide a better estimate on approximately what the median or mean is. The shorter the time interval, the less data points, but the more accurate.

The crux of what you're missing is that home prices for everyone are set on the margin of most recent transactions, and income isn't the whole story, as that assumption isn't making sense to you or the data. It's because there is saved up wealth that is a large factor in price too.

The solution is to build enough to break housing as an indefinite 7% YoY asset, which will stop this awful positive feedback loop.

Re: Why Ireland's housing bubble burst

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes sense if you don't expect the median housing price to be determined by the immediate 4x income loan without any savings. If you think housing price should be income * borrow rate, then you're entirely discounting any amount of time saving up, like a 22 year old graduate that rents for 13 years and then after saving up for that time decides to dump 300k into property and take out a loan of 350k (4 * 87.5k/yr)…

And at the margin the median price should be determined by home loan plus 10% deposit.

Yes, but don't assume 100% of people are home buyers right now. Many already own the asset, so it's safe to say maybe the top 5% are buying via income, and some X% are also using existing wealth/savings.

Re: Why Ireland's housing bubble burst

#163

I haven't looked at IReland's economics in forever, objective canadian observer. Lets see if i can find the cause. Ireland has been in a recession for over a year. Realistically Ireland has been in a depression since covid started, but there seems to be some funny numbers coming out of ireland trying to hide the depression to make it just a recession? Looking at their central bank's balance, Ireland the country effec…

> Looking at their central bank's balance, Ireland the country effectively went bankrupt in October 2006. ... In what sense did Ireland go bankrupt? That would imply that we abandoned at least some of the state's liabilities; in fact the state was criticised by many for not only paying its own liabilities, including those which it could have gotten out of without serious credit damage, but also for unnecessarily taki…

>In what sense did Ireland go bankrupt?

Correct that the use of terminology is incorrect because no country can go bankrupt. But the point remains.

>We massively increased taxes, massively cut spending, and borrowed vast amounts of money. We spent more per capita bailing out banks than anywhere else on earth. Again, criticism would generally be of _doing that, rather than becoming bankrupt_.

corporate tax for example was ~38% in 1996, 10 years later after bankruptcy it was 12.5%.

Personal income tax was ~48% in 1996, 10 years later, it was 42%.

Spending vs gdp, 38.6% gdp in 1996, 33.6% in 2006.

I dont agree with your analysis at all. Moreover these 'we' clearly indicate to me you're not objective.

>By any reasonable metric Ireland was in a far better fiscal state in 2019 than in 2006, and we had a fairly extensive and expensive response to covid.

Until a few days ago I didnt know what ireland did for covid. But no, what north america did was significant different from what ireland did. The irish response seemed to have been about reverse course years earlier which is shocking to me.

The reality is that ireland couldnt afford a covid response and the government fully was aware.

>This is incorrect. Ireland's marginal rate has been 48% or 52% depending on whether you count PRSI (which is not strictly an income tax), has been for over a decade, and continues to be.

My source is The Office of the Revenue Commissioners

https://www.revenue.ie/en/personal-tax-credits-reliefs-and-e...

Clearly indicating 40%.

>Actually, you know what, I'm not going through the rest of this. This is peak HackerNews; absolute nonsense, stated confidently. I'd suspect the involvement of an LLM, but for the grammar.

"Absolute nonsense" is the biased person who has gotten several fact incorrect.

Re: Why Ireland's housing bubble burst

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Looking at their central bank's balance, Ireland the country effectively went bankrupt in October 2006. ... In what sense did Ireland go bankrupt? That would imply that we abandoned at least some of the state's liabilities; in fact the state was criticised by many for not only paying its own liabilities, including those which it could have gotten out of without serious credit damage, but also for unnecessarily taki…

>In what sense did Ireland go bankrupt? Correct that the use of terminology is incorrect because no country can go bankrupt. But the point remains. >We massively increased taxes, massively cut spending, and borrowed vast amounts of money. We spent more per capita bailing out banks than anywhere else on earth. Again, criticism would generally be of _doing that, rather than becoming bankrupt_. corporate tax for example…

Again, not going to address all this nonsense, but as someone who’s lived here all my life, do you really think I don’t know what marginal rate of tax I pay? Conventional income tax is 40% marginal rate. USC, which is also an income tax, is 8% (depending on how cynical you want to be, you could say that it was separated out either for more progressive banding, or for the financial-crisis-era government to be able to vaguely pretend it was not massively increasing income tax). PRSI, which is a social insurance tax but which behaves almost exactly like an income tax until you are over 65, is 4%. For a total of 52%, or 48% + 4% social insurance tax for real pedants.

Re: Why Ireland's housing bubble burst

#165
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think 804k is the number of new temporary residents and 550k is the number of net temporary residents. I think it's reasonable to care about the net change in population from immigration because people are going to strain services in mostly the same way whether they are temporary or permanent. I think many temporary residents do strain housing in similar ways though, Canada has seen a massive increase in demand tha…

I think the issue with this conversation is that you have been talking about temporary immigrants all along, but I did not realise that originally so I have been talking about permanent immigrants all along. Hopefully both of our comments make a lot more sense in that light. Your first post used the word "immigrants" and talked about the home building rates and the health care sector. Most people don't expect tempora…

Temporary numbers are net not gross so if a tourist enters and leaves the country in a single year they count as 0 not 1.

Re: Why Ireland's housing bubble burst

#166
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue with this conversation is that you have been talking about temporary immigrants all along, but I did not realise that originally so I have been talking about permanent immigrants all along. Hopefully both of our comments make a lot more sense in that light. Your first post used the word "immigrants" and talked about the home building rates and the health care sector. Most people don't expect tempora…

Temporary numbers are net not gross so if a tourist enters and leaves the country in a single year they count as 0 not 1.

Right so zero net tourists, therefore zero housing pressure? Nope, that's why people complain about AirBnB.

My point is that picking a number at a point in time doesn't say much about the housing pressure - as the zero net tourists example shows.

Without knowing more about the number of temporary immigrants throughout the year (e.g. total number in Canada per month), the number of temporary immigrants as a yearly value is not much use (just as net zero tourists is not much use). Kinda depends on how quickly the temporary immigrants roll over.

Interestingly enough NZ and Australia have sharply reduced the number of working visas. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/513642/immigration-chan...

Also, I noticed an article implying that Canada is much more successful at getting wealthy immigrants:

  Immigration lawyers [in NZ] are worried by a dramatic drop in the number of millionaires receiving so-called golden visas. "If you have investors looking at options they're going to go for an easier option, they're going to go for Canada", he said.
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