Anne Rabbitte (Galway East, Fianna Fail)
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205. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government the number of houses the local authority purchased off the open market in each of the years 2014 to 2016 to date in tabular form. [38809/16]

Anne Rabbitte (Galway East, Fianna Fail)
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206. To ask the Minister for Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government the average price that the local authority paid for properties purchased in each of the years 2014 to 2016 to date by county in tabular form. [38810/16]

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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I propose to take Questions Nos. 205 and 206 together.

Under my Department’s Social Housing Capital Investment Programme, funding is provided to local authorities to deliver additional social housing stock through new construction projects and through the acquisition of new and previously owned houses/apartments. Details on properties purchased by local authorities for letting to those on their social housing waiting lists are available on my Department’s website at the following link:

.

Information on quarter three of 2016 is currently being finalised and will be published shortly, while details for the entirety of 2016 will be available in early 2017.

My Department does not routinely collect or publish information on the average cost incurred by local authorities in purchasing properties for social housing use and local authorities operate with delegated sanction for the majority of acquisitions they undertake. However, from an examination of the funding provided by my Department to local authorities in 2015 and 2016 for the purchase of properties for social housing use, the average cost per unit across the four Dublin authorities was circa €227,000 and across the other authorities was circa €144 ,000.