Talking PropertyWhat do you get when you cross 150,000 baby buggies with 150,000 impending immigrants? A leap in property values starting around 2009 says Kevin O'Connor
AMIDST all the dire coverage, from vagrant solicitors to plummeting prices, there is one "concrete" fact, unassailable in the face of every kind of gloom. Property, longer term, is a better bet than any other form of investment, short of discovering oil in your back garden.
Amid the current volatility, wise heads take the long view. Yes, yes, I know the hoary debate about Property v Equities. But the key advantage of property is: someone will always lend you money on property as security.
Not so with equities, and not much during autumn 2007, where even banks have lost 20 per cent of their values - and star rating - on stock exchanges this year. Bricks and mortar is yer only man.
That basic assurance consoles as I trip over yet another buggy in a supermarket. I am, I have decided, living in Buggy Land. Everywhere I go, in towns and cities, I'm falling tip-over-ass, as yet another contraption of the population boom gets in my way. Do I sound un-gallant? I hope not, for I am not un-gallant about the myriad Patricks and Deirdres and Sergeis coming down the tracks. Nor for the Olgas and Fatimas of the new breeding stock.
For one thing, they are the future of the country and for another - well, ask any landlord, the buggies are his future, too. Which bring me to the nub of the matter. Whatever the gloomy statistics about house prices losing another 3 per cent by Christmas, housing starts coming down from 80,000 units last year to 45,000 this year - no matter. Most of that displaced employment is diverted to building an extension in your street, for a neighbour who is tarting up with a little of the dosh made during the boom.
Look out your window and behold the yellow skips of urban renewal.
No matter, either the wailings of cautionary foghorns from ESRI to IIB and whatever tame economist you're having yourself, belling like lost gulls in a sea-mist, about reduced GDP, reducing output, reduced retail sales - but oddly, not reduced amounts of women flying to the Big Apple for retail therapy and a cut-price Botox. Reductio ad absurdum, indeed.
Of course, many professionals in the property market talked up the boom, just as they are in denial about the downturn. In other words, not being honest in positive times, they lack the vocabulary to describe the less good times.
Don't you love phrases like "a softening" in the market, like the Oirish "soft-day" which so entranced rain-sodden visitors. So, we have "corrections" in the market, another neat piece of denial. Though I will concede that "a new reality" entering the market, is - well a new reality.
They are so busy playing games with language and statistics, they have missed the elephant in the room, which is really the Baby in the Buggy.
Yes, there's the future, the baba in the buggy, coming down the line faster than anyone has properly counted. All needing shelter of various kinds and locations, the largest baby boom since the 1840s.
That's some boom. What this means has been attempted by statistical projection, which by very nature, is confined to figures.
HOW does a statistician quantify, in property terms, a battery of buggies on the down escalator in Tallaght or Galway to housing demand in 2020?
More to the point, how many men of sociological bent are tripping over said buggies? But pausing, in mid-flight, to think - hey, when you cross, say, 150,000 new buggies with 150,000 impending immigrants - I did say "impending", meaning not counted in 2007 - what do you get?
Another leap in property values, that's what - starting about 2009.
