Home completions head towards 40,000 – economist
While new-home completions are on an upward trajectory, Ireland has only moved the dial by one dwelling in terms of its housing stock per capita, attendees at the Beauchamps housing conference, ‘Beyond the Blueprint – Accelerate 2026’, were told.
“Over 36,000 homes were completed in 2025 – up 20% from the prior year – making it our strongest year of completions since the property crash,” said Kate English (chief economist at Deloitte) at the Dublin Royal Convention Centre (8 September).
“That momentum has continued in the first half of this year, and I believe it will hold into the second half. Annual completion volumes are rising towards 40,000 units, or about 6.6 new homes being delivered per 1,000 of the population,” she added.
This compares well with Britain, where the equivalent figure is around 2.1 new homes.
Undersupply
At 405 dwellings per 1,000 citizens in 2025, however, Ireland’s housing stock needs to get up to levels seen in the likes of Finland (approximately 550 dwellings per capita), according to English.
“Even though we had really strong delivery volumes last year compared to where we’ve been over the past decade, it just shows you how long it takes to eat into the kind of undersupply of stock we have,” she said.
Opening the conference, Minister for Housing James Browne said that strengthening Ireland’s housing sector was his “absolute priority” as the Government committed to record investment to boost supply – €28 billion in direct investment to 2030, along with significant additional funding through agencies such as the Land Development Agency (LDA) and the Housing Finance Agency.
One of the Government’s latest measures to support a significant scale-up in the supply of housing is the €1 billion Housing Infrastructure Investment Fund, which is being managed by the Housing Activation Office.
In a pre-recorded video message shown at the conference, Taoiseach Micheál Martin said that 82 infrastructure projects had already been funded under the programme to directly enable the delivery of 86,000 new homes and provide the potential for a further 113,000 homes.
“More broadly, we are addressing our overall infrastructure deficit through the Accelerating Infrastructure Action Plan, which is bringing about the legal, regulatory, and process reforms needed to deliver large enabling projects, such as MetroLink and the Greater Dublin Drainage Scheme,” he said.
‘Learn from Austria’
During the panel session entitled ‘Breaking the Infrastructure Bottleneck’, Alice Charles (director of cities, planning, and design at engineering consulting firm Arup) mentioned Austria as a country Ireland could learn from.
“Vienna is consistently regarded as one of the most liveable cities in the world. Broadly, there, they regard housing as social infrastructure, and about 60% of housing is provided by the state. As a single person, if you’re earning €57,000 or less, you qualify for this housing,” she said.
“By having that higher bar, it means there’s real integration in the types of households within Vienna’s social housing, and they also place an enormous emphasis on community infrastructure first to create a viable community.”
Cost-rental homes
Fidelma McManus (partner and head of housing at Beauchamps), who chaired the panel sessions, noted that Vienna was a model that many housing practitioners would hold out as the one to follow in embracing the cost-rental journey.
Deloitte research found that about 2,350 new cost-rental homes were delivered in 2025 across the LDA, approved housing bodies, and local authorities.
To qualify for cost-rental housing, net household income must be below €66,000 a year for Dublin and €59,000 for everywhere else in the country.
‘Incredible’ demand for housing lotteries
Aoife Watters (chief executive of construction-led housing body Respond) described cost-rental as “absolutely essential” to unlocking large-scale delivery because it led to mixed-tenure developments, which reflected real and sustainable communities.
“Maybe cost-rental does need to be recalibrated in terms of net-income thresholds and designation periods but, just as a concept, it’s massively needed,” she said.
“The demand for the housing lotteries we’re doing is incredible. They’re hugely oversubscribed because of the pressure the ‘squeezed middle’ is under.
“Ultimately, cost-rental was designed for people who weren’t eligible for social housing and couldn’t afford to go out to the private market; but now, because of general cost elevation, we’re getting very close to the top element [in terms of net income].”