Dr. Paul Egan:

The structural housing demand work my colleague, Dr. Adele Bergin, and I did last year followed a similar approach to that of the Central Bank. We used three parameters on which we made projections. One was the level of migration. We looked at a number of different scenarios in that regard. The second was household size, as Dr. Kelly mentioned, and the obsolescence rate of the housing stock. That is how many houses fall out of the stock each year because they are not suitable to be lived in. We broke this down to local authority level and pushed it out to 2040. That is fed into the national development plan. Our report does not take into account the issue of pent-up demand; it is just based on demographic factors - the structural demand. A measure of pent-up demand would have to be layered on top of our numbers.