Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 17 January 2024

Committee on Budgetary Oversight

Residential Premises Rental Income Relief and Mortgage Interest Relief in Budget 2024: Discussion

Mr. John Kennedy:

I am going to nitpick on parts of it that I can answer. I cannot speak to social housing or the structures there are there. Members would know far more than I would.

On the Deputy's question around whether investment funds or REITs are building purpose-built, large developments, yes they are. They are in the market. We do not get any of that business. REITs are not clients of ours. The question is whether those blocks would have been built if they had not funded that. It is a good question. I do not think a lot of them would have been. In one way, they are bringing supply to the market. The Deputy asked about price. The only way to really reduce price is to have supply in the market. That is the biggest driver of affordability. Obviously, we completely oversupplied and it went into a crash situation the last time but right now, in the market, prices are increasing because demand is exceeding the prices. Supply is not growing, and the demand is now suppressed a little bit more by the interest rate increases. That is why we are seeing prices holding and increasing from our perspective. Demand is decreasing because of the interest rate rises, and supply is decreasing at the same time. When the supply is decreasing more and there is more demand than supply, prices increase.