Mr. Gary Tobin:

I thank the Deputy for the question. The housing market is incredibly complex. What we saw in the run up to the crash was unsustainable lending to the construction sector, in large measure driven by the banks. We do not want to repeat that overlending. The Deputy referred to the commercial landlords, and essentially a new model - build to rent, is becoming apparent. What has tended to happen is that the banks are far more reluctant to lend to the construction sector for obvious reasons in that they have had their fingers badly burned and the construction sector is looking increasingly to non-bank finance to fund apartment construction. The build to rent model tends to be used for apartment blocks. Some of the investment funds were financing the construction of these apartment buildings. Now, not only are they financing the construction of the apartments, they have also in certain instances decided to buy the apartment blocks themselves and rent them out as they see that as a stream of income. Ultimately it is a policy decision whether the Government of the day thinks this is good or a bad. These investors are supplying additional supply into the market and obviously the market is not homogenous and there are different types of submarket segments and they tend to be supplying the upper end of the market.

The ultimate solution is supply, supply, supply. Supply will be the solution to the rental situation. The Department of Finance is following the housing market closely. We have a particular subgroup of our executive board which meets regularly and only looks at the housing market and we have published a number of recent papers on the housing market, including quite detailed statistics, which are all available on our website. We are quite happy to make some of that available to the committee members if it would be of interest to them.