Fingal estate agents say saleable housing is hard to come by

Realtors in Fingal are not surprised that there are fewer vacant residential properties in the area than first thought, and say saleable housing stock is proving hard to come by.

Doug Robertson has been involved in the north Dublin real estate market for over two decades, and said he had never come across a case of an owner strategically leaving their property vacant to speculate on its value.

"In all my years we didn't have one house we sold that was kept empty for years to make money on it to see if the market went up," the owner of Robertson Estate Agents in Donabate told The Irish Times.

“To me it wouldn’t make sense for somebody to buy an investment and sit on it and not rent it out unless they’ve got so much cash they don’t know what to do with it.”

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In light of figures revealed in a Fingal pilot study which indicate that there may be as few as 60 liveable properties lying vacant across the entire local authority area, he said vacant homes were more likely an issue in the city centre.

While Mr Robertson said his agency had a consistent flow of 14 or 15 properties available for sale at any one time, Terry O'Reilly, an estate agent in Portmarnock, said he only had half the amount of units available for sale compared to two or three years ago.

Nine units

Whereas the business would usually have eight or nine units for sale, this has dropped to four in the Portmarnock/Malahide area, according to Mr O'Reilly.

An analysis conducted by Sherry FitzGerald estate agents and published this week showed there were 3,900 housing units for sale across the whole of Dublin in the 12 months up to July, representing less than 1 per cent of the county’s housing stock and down from 4,500 the previous year.

Mr O'Reilly said vacant units were simply not available in the Fingal area, and was adamant there was "definitely not" 3,000 such properties as is suggested in geodirectory figures compiled by the Central Statistics Office.

“It is a red herring. There is nothing out there vacant that we know of. Anything that’s there is gone.”

Mr O’Reilly added that housing stock was difficult to come across in the area, and said the last three leaflet drops to householders yielded just one property for sale.