Official figures show that 29,851 new homes were completed last year – an increase of just over 45% compared with 2021.

The Central Statistics Office (CSO) said that the 2022 figure also represented a rise of more than 40% on the pre-pandemic 2019 total.

For the final three months of 2022, the number of completions increased by just over 30% compared with a year earlier, to 9,148.

Almost 60% of homes built last year were in Dublin or the Mid-East (Meath, Louth, Kildare, and Wicklow).

Apartments’ share growing

More apartments were completed last year than in 2020 and 2021 combined, though there were COVID-19 restrictions on construction in place during those years.

The 9,166 apartments built last year represented an annual increase of almost 80%.

The CSO said that apartments had been taking an increasing share of the total number of completions in recent years – they accounted for 30.7% of completions last year, compared with 16.5% in 2019.

Homes in housing schemes were up almost 42% to 15,163, while 5,522 single dwellings were completed – up almost 17% on the 2021 figure.

Smaller homes

All regions of the country recorded annual increases in home completions in the final quarter of 2022, and in the year as a whole.

A new measure introduced by the CSO to smooth out seasonal variations in construction showed, however, that there was a small drop of just under 3% in seasonally adjusted new homes built in the final quarter of 2022 when compared with the third quarter.

The figures also show a continuing drop in the average size of a new home. The index the CSO uses to measure this recorded a figure of 75, compared with 100 in the base year of 2016.

“This decrease is driven by both an increase in the proportion of completed dwellings being apartments, and a decrease in the size of single and scheme dwellings,” the CSO said.