This article is from page 2 of the 2011-08-16 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 2 JPG
THE scale of the crisis in the Clare property market has been hammered home by newly released Department of Environment figures which show that new house registrations and completions have gone into freefall over the first six months of the year. The Clare People has learned that new house registrations in the county have plummetted by nearly 75 per cent from January to June 2011, while during the same period, house completions have fallen by 63 per cent.
And, when compared to the figures for other counties in the mid-west catchment area, the dramatic falloff in housing activity places Clare at the bottom of the mid-west league table where both house registrations and completions are concerned.
House completion numbers in the region dropped by 46 per cent from 758 to 410 during the first six months of 2011, but Clare is running 17 percentage points ahead of this average, with completion rates from January to June dropping from 378 to 140 over the corresponding period last year.
The figures for new house registrations are more startling – only six houses have been registered so far in 2011, as compared to 23 for the same six-month period in 2010.
Again, this massive reduction of just under 75 per cent is running well ahead of the overall average reduction for the region of 54 per cent.
The problems being experienced within the housing industry in Clare come on the back of a claim from one of Clare’s leading estate agents earlier this month that the building of new housing estates could be about to grind to a halt.
“With prices such that it costs more to build than a builder will get when a house is sold, then no one is going to build new estates,” said Diarmuid McMahon of Sherry Fitzgerald in Ennis when revealing that house prices in the county had dropped back to 1990s levels.
A major contributory factor to the drop in prices and the slowdown in new house building emerged in the preliminary returns for the 2011 National Census returns for Clare that were released in July.
The Central Statistics Office (CSO) returns revealed that the number of new housing stock in Clare increased by 14 per cent in between the 2006 and 2011 censuses, which means that Clare house builds ran ahead of the national average of 13.3 per cent.
However, the breakdown of these figures also revealed that the vacant housing rate in Clare was running at nearly 22 per cent, eight points higher than the national average of 14.7 per cent, with the western seaboard being the worst part of the county affected, with over 25 per cent houses vacant. The number of vacant housing was attributed to the building boom that took place over the space of the previous decade.