Skip to main content

House Prices To Fall Until 2012...

House prices to fall until 2012, industry bosses told...

HOUSE prices will continue to slide until 2012, it has been claimed, as construction chiefs were told the industry will never be the same again.

Yesterday’s figures also show that lending to the construction industry soared from €10 million in 2001 to €115m at its peak.

The statistics were revealed at the Construction Industry Federation (CIF) conference in Cork.

Labour party leader Eamon Gilmore said that the industry will never again employ the same number of people as it did two years ago.

He said there will again be a demand for new housing but he wants a construction industry – like any other – that is sustainable.

At its peak in 2007, the industry employed 280,000 direct employees and a further 120,000 indirect, equivalent to 19% of total employment.

Today it employs 200,000 but the CIF said that another 100,000 direct and indirect jobs could still be lost.

Mr Gilmore also said there is huge scope for reform in Ireland’s planning laws.

This news comes as the federation looks for powers to be allowed to reduce wages in the sector.

It said wage costs in the construction industry are "extremely high" compared to the wage costs in manufacturing industry.

CIF president Andy O’Gorman said it is important that there is flexibility in the Registered Employment Agreement to allow wages be adjusted or to have an "inability to pay" clause inserted as is available to employers in other sectors.

At present if a construction company cannot pay wages it is put out of business, he said.

Foreign Affairs Minister Micheál Martin, who also spoke at the conference said the proposed National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) is not a bailout for developers.

The CIF said construction output will fall to below €10bn in 2011, down from a peak of €36bn in 2006.

In 2010, it is expected that the industry will build 10,000 new homes, that is 80,000 less than the output in 2006 and substantially below the level of 45,000 to 50,000 identified as the medium to long term required level, according to the CIF.

It said the pipeline of new public sector construction projects is somewhere between €500m and €1bn this year, which it said is a far cry from the €6bn needed to achieve the Government commitments set out in April’s budget.

Mr O’Gorman said the "interim period" created by the NAMA announcement is causing particular problems, with banks unwilling to lend against viable projects before the transfer of loans, good as well as bad, into the new agency.
"Add in falling public and private investment and construction is experiencing its perfect storm," he said.

The federation also urged a Yes vote in the upcoming Lisbon referendum.

It said it is important to remember that Ireland’s success in attracting high quality foreign direct investment has been largely predicated on its access to the markets of Europe.



Report by Niamh Hennessy - Irish Examiner

Popular posts from this blog

Property Crash Homes For Sale...

Hundreds of repossessed homes in Ireland to be sold by auction... UK property consultancy Allsop to hold auction in April at Dublin's Shelbourne hotel: Flats in Ireland that could have fetched €150,000 in the Celtic Tiger years are to be put on the market for as little as €25,000 (£21,000) in the country's first ever mass auction of repossessed homes. And, in a sign of how wide the property crash is, the latest item to turn up in liquidation sales in Dublin is a job lot of 15 cranes, including a pair towering over Anglo Irish Bank's half-built headquarters in the city's docklands. "Tower cranes were among the most sought-after heavy plant and machinery 10 years ago," Ricky Wilson of Wilsons Auctions says. "You couldn't buy them quick enough. Now they are left idle for two or three years on sites." He has 15 cranes worth €500,000 going on sale on 26 March, with German, Dutch and Polish buyers expressing interest. But it is the auction ...

Young, Irish And Out Of Here...

As the government continues to pump billions into our much discredited banking system, many Irish people unable to find work here are facing into a future outside of this country. John Downes, News Investigations Correspondent, spoke to some of the new Irish diaspora about their recent experiences of emigration... By any stretch of the imagination, they were a startling set of figures, prompting echoes of a past which we thought we had left behind. According to ESRI data released last week, we can expect net emigration of 60,000 in the year to this April – and a further 40,000 by April 2011. That's almost 1,000 of our best and brightest leaving every week. Yet the ESRI's predictions are simply the latest – if most stark – indications of a return to mass emigration among Ireland's unemployed, as the downturn has continued to take its toll. In September, for example, the Central Statistics Office revealed that Ireland witnessed a return to net emigration for the first time si...

As Featured On Dublin Postcards, Ad's, U2 Video...

I see in the Irish Independent today an item concerning a favourite, Dublin landmark, of mine... "THEY have featured in numerous postcards and a very famous Guinness ad, but perhaps their most important cameo appearance came when they featured in U2s 'Pride (In The Name Of Love)' video. However, Dublin City Council does not believe the Poolbeg chimneys are iconic enough to place on their Record of Protected Structures. Following a request from Cllr Dermot Lacey (Lab) to have the landmark ESB chimneys placed on the protected record, city councillors heard that city planners had conducted a survey, history and full assessment of the chimneys. They concluded from this that while the Poolbeg chimneys were considered to be of a certain level of architectural, social and historical significance, they were not of sufficient value within the meaning of the Planning and Development Act, 2000. Complex The twin red and white chimney stacks measure 680 feet in height and were construc...