Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 3 March 2022

Public Accounts Committee

2020 Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Home Building Finance Ireland - Financial Statements 2020

9:30 am

Ms Dara Deering:

I will let Mr. Alger give the Deputy a sense of what those rents may be when those homes are built. To help the committee, the reality that we faced in 2020 was that we had schemes shovel-ready and ready to start building homes. I appreciate those homes would be for the rental market but our view is that as part of increasing the overall supply, we must see an increase in the supply of rental properties. They were shovel-ready and, on the basis of our market analysis right then, they could not keep going because they typically borrowed from the domestic sector, and the domestic sector was rightly, to my mind, focused on supporting families and small businesses who needed payment breaks. That is why we did the momentum fund. I will let my colleague give the Deputy a flavour of what rents may be achieved, recognising that these apartments will come to the rental stock in a number of years.