Institutional investors and State-backed entities such as Approved Housing Bodies (AHBs) bought over a fifth of the homes that came up for sale on the Irish property market last year.
That’s according to new figures from the Central Statistics Office (CSO).
There was a total of 61,471 residential property transactions with a value of €24.6 billion filed with the Revenue Commissioners in 2024, the agency said.
Of these, 12,696 (20.7 per cent) worth €5 billion were purchases made by non-household entities.
“Non-household transactions are residential dwelling transactions made by private companies, charitable organisations, and state institutions,” the CSO said.
On the state side, these include local authorities, AHBs and the Land Development Agency (LDA).
Private rented sector (PRS) investors have bought most of the apartments built in Dublin and elsewhere in recent years.
New dwellings accounted for 56.4 per cent of all purchases made by non-households in 2024, the CSO said.
The acceleration in housing supply in 2021, 2022 and 2023 was in the main driven by apartment developments in Dublin and other urban locations. The current stagnation in supply – new home completions dropped by 7 per cent to 30,000 last year – is primarily because of a fall-off in this type of development.
Apartment completions fell from 12,000 units to 9,000 last year and are expected to fall again this year.
Foreign institutional investors had, until recently, been financing an apartment building boom in Dublin and elsewhere but higher interest rates after 2022, combined with other factors, have triggered a slowdown.
To entice foreign investment back into the sector here, the Government has overhauled the State’s system of rent pressure zones (RPZs).
Under the proposed reform, landlords will be able to reset rents at the going market rate when a tenant leaves.
Smaller landlords with three or fewer units will, however, have to offer rolling six-year tenancies while large ones will not be able to evict a tenant who has complied with their obligations except in very limited circumstances.
Between 2013 and 2024 total private residential investment here totalled €10.8 billion, an average of €902 million a year. The most recent figures (€1.6 billion in 2022; €597 million in 2023; and €231 million last year) highlight the slowdown.
The CSO figures show that non-household entities sold 20,841 dwellings at market prices, an increase of 9.3 per cent on the 19,061 sales made by them in 2023.
The total value of the sales by non-household entities in 2024 was €9 billion, up 19.6 per cent on the 2023 value.
Non-household entities in the construction sector sold 13,502 residential properties with a total value of €6 billion in 2024, up 14.3 per cent on the total value of sales made by this sector in 2023. The CSO said non-household entities in the construction sector accounted for 64.8 per cent of the total volume of sales by non-households in 2024.
