On Monday, the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, James Browne, attended a major event in Cannes. He was there to address the Marché International des Professionels de l’Immoblier which is attended by representatives of investment funds looking for attractive opportunities.
According to MIPM the event hoped to attract funds which control €4 trillion in assets. The people who control all of that are usually not fussy where they make their money. The Irish state is attractive to such funds given our generous tax regime.
Browne was there to peddle Ireland’s ass as somewhere the funds might increase their interest in acquiring control over the housing market. The funds are already wetting their beaks as the proportion of build to rent apartment blocks continues to rise as part of the construction that is taking place.
Social Democrat spokesperson on housing, Rory Ahearne, was not impressed either by the pitch nor by the location. Ahearne claimed that “It is highly inappropriate that the Minister for Housing is attending an international property conference in France this week aimed at enticing more vulture funds to Ireland”.
Browne told the delegates that the funds could help to meet the Government’s targets for “affordable ownership, protecting renters and improving affordability for buyers and renters.” He also sought to entice their interest in “all types of tenures.”
Well, the construction statistics would suggest that the funds are very little interested in any of those things. Their preferred and almost exclusive model is built to rent apartments which they prefer to building houses that people can expect to buy. Otherwise, they would not be buying entire housing developments off the plans which prevents them appearing on the open market for ordinary punters.
The developers have to tick the boxes on social housing availability which they are happy to do given the ease with which the planning process works in their favour and it is a guaranteed sale to the State through the local authorities. Entire developments are shooting up in which residents are either dependent on the State or the investment funds for a place to live which they will never plausibly own in the vast majority of cases.
That is a complete overturning of what was traditionally the Irish housing model. That – which operated largely successfully for more than half a century from the 1930s on – was based on the ability of people to buy their own home if they so wished, and they mostly did.
That applied not only to the middle class to which home ownership in other countries was largely confined over that period, but to local authority tenants who were given good terms to buy the house they lived in.
Part of the social contract was that working people could have a reasonable expectation of being able to buy their own home and to pass it on to their children. Something that in the bad old days was done by people on an average single household wage.
The statistics indicate the sea change that has taken place in the housing sector. According to the Central Statistics Office there was a total of 36,284 new dwellings completed in 2025. There was almost a 40% increase in the number of apartments completed which accounted for 12,047 or one third of all completions.
Before Covid, apartments only accounted for around 16% of housing completions. The CSO does not provide a breakdown of how many apartments are rented rather than owner occupied but it is apparent that the vast majority are owned by landlords and increasingly so by the large investment funds.
Given that many of the investment funds that have moved into the Irish market are American, it might be thought that some clue to the direction in which this is going is mirrored in the United States. In fact, American home ownership is 66% and has remained unchanged since 2000.
The large investment funds control less than 1% of single-family homes in the U.S. and while the same proportion of housing as here is rental, the funds only own around 3% of the total rental stock. The vast majority of landlords remain ‘Mom and Pop’ owners who generally rent out one unit.
The data on homeownership in the Irish state is very interesting. As the graph below shows it had risen steadily through the years after the foundation of the Free State and particularly under the Fianna Fáil governments after 1932.
By 1960 the homeownership rate was 60% and that rose to almost 80% in the early 1990s. It has fallen sharply since and appears to be on an inexorable downward trend.
The connection between this and the growing slice of the housing market under the control of the investment funds is stark. A Department of Finance paper from 2024 contained the information that almost half – 46% – of all apartments built between 2017 and 2023 were owned by 50 large landlords, many of them investment funds.
That provides a worrying contrast to both other European countries – particularly the former socialist states of central and eastern Europe where the trend has been towards people owning what were formerly state owned dwellings – and to the United States where homeownership has remained steady despite the same sort of financial shocks which have hit Ireland since 2000.
It is surely ironic that the country in which many of the largest ‘vulture funds’ are based has managed to curtail their role in the housing market.
In contrast, the Irish state and the people who are responsible for administering it appear not to regard such social factors as particularly important. Hence their continued soliciting of the investment funds in the hope that some of their trillions might be devoted to snapping up an even greater slice of housing here to be rented out.
This in a country where suspicion of large-scale absentee landlordism was soundly grounded in the knowledge of the damaging impact it had had on Irish society and the economy for hundreds of years. And all this state effort is in pursuit of housing that will in the greater part go to accommodate people who have moved to live here because they are in demand by other corporate overseas entities.
That amounts to not only staggering shortsightedness on the part of a managerial class who cannot see beyond the next revenue figures, but a complete lack of historical nous or indeed any sort of vision of what a sovereign state as opposite to a rentier industrial and financial centre might look like.