Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

No. Some 60%, 30,000 of the 50,000 sites, have actually gone to other types of buyers, and they are equally culpable of hoarding land, as much as anybody else. I said this is the long-term report and I put this graphic in today, but if I could take the Deputy back to that graphic, I was trying to illustrate it in a hopefully very straightforward and simple way for people. If the Deputy looks at the graphic on page 4 of my presentation, and the middle bar there, that is the base case house price. If one has a house for sale on the market for €275,000, then the site value in that instance, which is the red box, depends on where the location is, but could be €40,000 to €50,000. It depends on the location of the overall component. If house prices go up by 20%, then everything else stays the same. The cost of building does not change that much. The developer profit generally stays the same.

The guy who has the land, who is hoarding it without doing anything to it, will see the value of the land going from approximately €40,000 or €50,000 to approximately €125,000. My point is that with the system, a guy can buy land and effectively hold it back on the expectation of rising house prices. He does not even have to build a house and he can just sell the land. It is super profit. That is something I feel strongly about and it needs to be examined. Sometimes people who buy land have no interest in building houses.

Of the potential 20,000 or 50,000 sites bought by these funds, in the two to three-year time horizon, they will end up back in the system. There must be some incentive if a party has land that is viable for development and a normal profit in building houses can be made. Given the demand for housing in the system, there must be an incentive to make that party sell the land instead of hoarding it and squeezing it as house prices rise quickly.