Vacant-property refurbishment grants up to €50,000 to be available countrywide

Grants of between €30,000 and €50,000 are to be extended to all vacant properties across the country while further funding may be provided to expand the scheme in the future, the Minister for Housing Darragh O’Brien has said.

Mr O’Brien said vacancy rates remain “too high” but are falling year-on-year.

The Minister was speaking in Dublin on Tuesday as the Croí Cónaithe vacant property refurbishment grant was expanded to include properties in cities and more remote rural areas. The scheme, which was announced last July, was originally aimed at vacant properties in towns and villages, with 426 applications received to date.

Properties considered for inclusion must be vacant for two years or more and built before 1993.

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Mr O’Brien said if the €50 million set aside for the Croí Cónaithe vacant property fund was allocated, the Government would expand it further. “Vacancy is a scourge right across the country, no question, and I think this is a real support to be able to help homebuyers,” he said.

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The Dublin Fingal TD said where the owner of a vacant property was not engaging with the process, the vacant property tax introduced in the budget “will take effect”.

Mr O’Brien also said his department was engaged with the Housing Agency to “move forward on a national CPO [compulsory purchase order] campaign that they will manage on behalf of local authorities”.

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He said “some local authorities are good at CPO-ing, it’s a long process, others need support to do more. What we’ve already found in the applications that we’ve got in, is that people who have vacant properties are now seeing that there are people there who are willing to buy them. That issue between the cost of buying them and the cost of doing them up is now that we’re able to bridge the gap. Already, in the 400-odd applications we’ve got in, they are where property owners are actually already engaging, where properties are being sold.”

Mr O’Brien said the Government’s Housing for All strategy was constantly under review and that the State needed to get up to building 40,000 homes per year.

He said this year’s housing target of 24,600 units would be exceeded with more social homes delivered in 2022 “ than in decades” while the target for next year was 29,000 homes.

“It [Housing for All] is a plan that’s live … Our big focus is getting up to a substantial, sustainable level in relation to social housing delivery that we can tackle our social housing list,” he said.

Mr O’Brien also said he would be bringing the Consolidated Planning Bill to Cabinet in early December, which would bring about the “most significant changes to planning and streamlining our planning process since the year 2000″.