MORE than half of new homes sold in Limerick are not making it to the individual buyer’s market, instead being snapped up by the ‘non-household sector’, a new report has found.
Research by DNG auctioneers found that 239 new home sales out of a total of 429 in Limerick in 2023 were sold as part of block sales to the “non-household sector”, which includes local authorities, approved housing bodies (AHBs), and investment funds.
DNG also said that just 176 new homes were available to individual buyers in all of Limerick across last year.
The auctioneer also claimed that the number of homes sold in Ireland is being underreported, due to the fact that large block sales of homes are only being denoted on the Property Price Register as one transaction, even if multiple houses are included in the sale.
DNG Director of Research Paul Murgatroyd said that the underreporting of home sale statistics mean that private individuals could only purchase six out of every 20 homes built across all of Ireland last year.
“Our analysis of transactions recorded by the Property Price Register clearly shows that the register is actually underreporting the total volume of new homes sales in the state each year,” Mr Murgatroyd said.
“The research shows that across the whole state, block sales of multiple units to one buyer in one transaction accounted for 42 per cent of all the new homes sales recorded by the PPR last year, meaning that private individuals only had the opportunity to purchase six out of every 10 homes built.”
According to DNG’s report, Limerick also had the joint lowest amount of new home sales in 2023, sitting on par with Galway.
Limerick had two new homes sold per 1,000 of the population, coming in one third below the national average of 3.3.
And while more than half of all new homes sold in Limerick last year were siphoned away from the market for individual buyers by the non-household sector, the DNG director of research said it was impossible to say how many were purchased by private investment funds versus local authorities or AHBs.
“Unfortunately we are not privy to who exactly the block sales were purchased by – for example a charity or an investment fund – so we have no way of knowing the breakdown of how many sales went to any specific type of non household buyer,” Mr Murgatroyd told the Limerick Post.
