Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 23 January 2024
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government
Update on Affordable Homes, Public Lands, Strategic Planning and Projects: Land Development Agency
Mr. John Coleman:
Exactly. They will have to take a view on how much the price of steel will be over the three years it will take to build this scheme, how much the cost of labour will be, whether they will have trouble sourcing labour, subcontractors, etc. It is quite a complex risk for them to manage. A developer has more flexibility. They, particularly the larger ones, would not go to a main contractor. They would bring in their own subcontractors, who might work with them across all of their schemes. They would be able to drive their supply chain a bit better. That enables them to reduce their pricing or cost a bit better by not going the main contractor route. What it does is narrow the gap a little bit. As well as that, for the Project Tosaigh transactions we are focusing on, we are focusing on areas where the land value element is very small. If someone shows up to our door with a scheme where the embedded land cost is €75,000 per home, we have no interest. It is not for us. The land cost has to be approximately less than 5% of the overall cost of delivery. That is our sense of things. The differential for the land might not be huge as well. When all of these things are taken in aggregate, it narrows the gap between what it costs for us to deliver directly and what it costs to source through Project Tosaigh. It is not massively different as a result.
I will bring in my colleague, Mr. O'Neill, the head of property, for an update on the digital hub and the St. Teresa's Gardens brownfields.