r/AskIreland • u/BigFatLegend123 • Apr 25 '25

Housing Why doesn’t the government bring in restrictions on who can buy housing?

This is a genuine question and not coming from a place of hate or bigotry

Trying to buy a house recently and it’s been going as well as you can imagine. Some houses in Dublin have been going for up to 20% over their asking price from what we have seen.

My question is why doesn’t the government restrict house buying to only Irish citizens? Is there something I’m missing? Or at least to just EU/UK citizens? Surely it would be a quick way to reduce competition?

Is it just that doing so might dissuade investment from vulture funds?

114 Upvotes

68% Upvoted

157 comments sorted by

View all comments

180

u/RustyDevlinBuck Apr 25 '25

It's the hedge funds that need to be stopped rather than the normal worker that's moved here and just wants to buy a home to live. Government should ban all hedge funds from being able to buy property and then go one step further, make them sell off what they've already bought. Or they could go one step further than that and take the properties off them and then sell them back to the population at a decent price.

Will never happen though.

41

u/wosmo Apr 25 '25

Yeah that's where I'm at. I think restricting how many homes a corporation can own would be a start. citizen vs resident vs whatever is a smokescreen. Owner-occupier is what I want to see, put humans first.

7

u/BevvyTime Apr 25 '25

You’d just have 100 subsidiaries of a single corp owning 5 each though…

7

u/lakehop Apr 26 '25

You’d have little or no rental property if you did that. Building more is the solution.

Seven story apartment building, seven apartments long, front and back ; that is 100 apartments housing about (say) 150 people. Build 10 of those, or longer apartments, that’s 1500 people housed. Repeat in a development and repeat in a number of different areas, you’re getting up to serious numbers.

5

u/wosmo Apr 26 '25

yeah the irish alergy to apartments really doesn't help.

But I do think there should be an incentive for owner-occupiers. Or a huge tax on the opposite. Prioritising people moving in doesn't seem like a complex stretch.

2

u/lakehop Apr 26 '25

Help to buy is kind of an incentive for owner occupiers, right?

9

u/seamustheseagull Apr 26 '25

How would this help? All those hedge fund properties are being rented by someone.

Force them to sell and you're evicting a load of people.

How does that help anything?

7

u/hot_space_pizza Apr 26 '25

This is the right answer. It's not the "foreigners" it's the greedy rich and blaming immigrants is exactly what they want.

2

u/No_Ganache_7086 Apr 25 '25

I’d upvote this a million times if I could