Throughout the year, we’ve been keeping our eye on house building activity, and have seen some sharper than expected increases. Back in May, we wrote a blog about the Edinburgh property market being at its most buoyant since the credit crunch, and in Ireland, we’re also seeing a positive picture emerging, with a sharp rise in house building.

This week, Advantage, Structural Defects Warranty experts, read that construction of residential units in Ireland is up more than 50% on last year, according to a new survey.

According to Ireland’s address database GeoDirectory, more than 14,000 residential buildings were under construction in June 2019, up 52.8% on the same period last year.

As reported by the Belfast Telegraph: The majority of the construction work was located in the greater Dublin area. Construction activity was weakest in Connacht and Ulster.

The residential buildings report, prepared by EY-DKM Economic Advisory on behalf of GeoDirectory, also found the average house price nationally in the 12 months to April was 289,146 euro.

When Dublin was excluded, the average house price fell to 214,679 euro.

Only three counties recorded prices higher than the national average. These were Dublin (432,327 euro), Wicklow (341,217 euro) and Kildare (297,356 euro), while Meath, Cork, Kilkenny, Galway and Louth were the only other counties to record average prices over 200,000 euro.

GeoDirectory chief executive Dara Keogh said:

“The construction industry is rising to the challenge of demand for housing, but it is clear that there is still some way to go to reach the required level of supply.

“Construction activity levels are almost four times higher than this stage in 2015 and this is reflected in the number of new property purchases. One in five houses bought in the last 12 months was new, and in commuter counties such as Meath, Kildare and Wicklow, this proportion was much higher.”

We’ve been writing recently about how house building is playing a major role in driving construction output, looking at how house building has returned the sector to growth and also at how house building now accounts for 60 per cent of all construction work. With a new Prime Minister and new Housing Minister, we’ll be interested to see whether there’s a change of emphasis on the government’s ambitious social housing programme, and whether the recent spate of council house building continues at the same rate, helping to boost house building figures as a whole.

We’ll be back soon with a new Advantage Structural Defects Warranty blog. In the meantime, thank you for reading!