So you think houses are dear? Try buying land.

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Woodsman

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Yiz are all mad. Well perhaps just deluded and I love reading through the pages and seeing how we have enthusiastically embraced property investment. But have you no memory? In 1980 overdraft rates were in the 20% bracket, property was unsaleable and jobs??? In 1992 you could buy land in Meath for €1500 per acre. The same land is now fetching app €50,000 per acre. Now that is of course for well located property. Poorly located property was unsaleable at virtually any price in 1992. That was just fourteen years ago!!! Well located farmland in Meath in 1978 was fetching app £4000 per acre and this fell almost overnight to around £700 per acre and remained at an historically low price for the next twelve/sixteen years. Land now costing €50,000 per acre is returning a massive €200 per acre pa and that is the top end of the earnings range!!
And you think Houses are dear!!! What will happen in the future? I can sell my farm in Ireland right now for multiple millions and could move to England where I could purchase a far superior property complete with fine country house and buildings for app £6000 per acre or move to France for app €1200 per acre. What is going on in Ireland?
 
Woodsman said:
I can sell my farm in Ireland right now for multiple millions and could move to England where I could purchase a far superior property complete with fine country house and buildings for app £6000 per acre or move to France for app €1200 per acre.?
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Well why don't yeah?
 
it's a great country to live in....
your post is interesting. i am sure that if you looked at England during the miners strike and compare the cost per acre then to the cost per acre now ,there is probably the same percentage rise for land in desireable areas..i am sure that if you looked hard enough in ireland you could find farms for sale in remote areas for 6k per acre..of course you probably wouldn't be able to build houses etc on these lands
 
Well of course there is land available in remote corners of Leitrim, Sligo, Mayo etc for 6k per acre or less but my point was that surely not everyone is paying the current crazy prices just for the pleasure of owning a bit of land. The top return is €200 per acre per annum so how come its fetching hundreds of times this figure? I cannot understand why land in Britain is so much cheaper than here. Its not a bad place to live and they are reasonably civilised (if you remove the soccer fans) and speak the same language as us. Do they know something we dont??
 
Woodsman said:
Well of course there is land available in remote corners of Leitrim, Sligo, Mayo etc for 6k per acre or less but my point was that surely not everyone is paying the current crazy prices just for the pleasure of owning a bit of land. The top return is €200 per acre per annum so how come its fetching hundreds of times this figure? I cannot understand why land in Britain is so much cheaper than here. Its not a bad place to live and they are reasonably civilised (if you remove the soccer fans) and speak the same language as us. Do they know something we dont??
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How many people would be left if you removed the soccer fans!?!?!?!
 
supply and demand and of course england is not Ireland and home is where the heart is if you are most Irish people..plus of course there is the little fact of 700 years and being driven from the land in Ireland leading to now that we can afford it then we are buying it to secure for the future
 
therave said:
supply and demand and of course england is not Ireland and home is where the heart is if you are most Irish people..plus of course there is the little fact of 700 years and being driven from the land in Ireland leading to now that we can afford it then we are buying it to secure for the future
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Ha!

We have far more land available than the UK and a much lower population density. Why weren't we securing it for the future in the 80s when you could buy land for nohing (and we still had the 700 years behind us)? This is a speculative bubble and we are securing nothing for the future unfortunately.
 
that i would think is a matter of personal choice.i can honestly say back in the 80's there was no money about and jobs were hard to come by. as soon as i got a job i started looking at house in 1987 and the prices for a 3 bed semi were about 25k,the old term,i should have bought 10 back then springs to mind.but of course u have to jump through hoops back then to even get to see the bank manager.. luckily i had a good dolicitor who introduced me to a bank manager in 1993 and even then the houses have grown to 37k.. my point.. it's all relevant
 
Thank you for reminding us. It is of course a speculative bubble exactly the same as the land bubble of the late 1970s. How can something that yields app €150/200 per acre annually be worth 50k?
 
Woodsman said:
Thank you for reminding us. It is of course a speculative bubble exactly the same as the land bubble of the late 1970s. How can something that yields app €150/200 per acre annually be worth 50k?
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When it has develpoment potential.
 
Well I sold a Dublin house 3 years ago (at the 'real height' of the speculation craze, believing prices were about to topple).......but 'sin e sceal eile'; my reasoning was (a) that Dublin was losing its appeal as a desirable place to live due to overdevelopment, crime-and-drug levels and traffic congestion and that (b) I am approaching retirement and whilst fit and very healthy (thank God) a comfortable single-story dwelling (I like the ambiance of old cottages) would be sensible. After a lifetime of city-living and fast-lane careers I want peace, quiet and ample space for a large garden. As a first step I looked at renovation projects - ruined cottages surrounded by 2 - 5 acres. These were 'going for a song' 20 years ago; now with the property-speculation mania everyone who owns a quarter-acre or has a few acres round their property 'in the country' wants to cash it in...........so that option has become far less attractive. You have to check out whether the farmer selling you a couple of acres and your 'remote peaceful renovated cottage' is not also selling the adjoining 10 acres to a developer. My impression is that this is the underlying reason that land-prices are going up so steeply. It is the same old 'property speculator' scenario that exists in the city but it is a bit more complex. I withdrew when it became apparant that acre-plots with 'sea views' were doubling in price year-on-year. I am very aware that given the prognostications of effects of global warming these stretches of western coastline will probably be underwater in 30 years time and I don't want to seek rehousing in my 80's should I still be around. I have always remembered a kid who used to stop and chat on his way home from school years ago when I spent summers on The Dingle penninsula. He wanted to be a 'civil servant in Dublin' and was studying hard. I asked him if he would miss the sea and the beauty of the area. He laughed and said "You can't eat the scenery!"

As far as the relative value of - specifically - farmland - in Ireland and England goes, in very recent history the UK was full of burning pyres of cattle and sheep slaughtered to eradicate BSE. Compensation notwithstanding, thousands of farmers were ruined, hundreds of thousands gave up, and hundreds committed suicide after their herds were slaughtered and burned. In addition to this real and painful event influencing land-value, people in the UK have been through the 'boom-bust' cycles of property many times and have no illusions or romantic ideas here about the real costs of ownership. In addition farming is highly competitive in the UK and prices are determined by the huge supermarket chains. Connecting this with another thread on AAM
 
about Irish competitiveness I think anyone who moves from farming in Ireland to farming in the UK might have a shock on encountering the much more intensive highly-focussed approaches and have difficulty surviving in a context where supermarket shelves carry cheap, intensively-farmed (often organic or specialist) produce year-round.

I think what I'm getting at is that the rising price of land - including agricultural land - does not appear to be intrinsically to do with agriculture but with property-development and is part of the speculative bubble.
 
The current high price of FARM land is of course a bubble and linked to the high price of DEVELOPMENT land where farmers get a bundle for their land near a town and feel they must reinvest in farmland. But what they are buying has NO development value in many cases and still makes crazy money.

Farming in Ireland is not much different to England in that our food prices are below the cost of production. In 1946 a well paid worker got £3.10s a week while a fat pig fetched £18. So, it took five weeks wages to buy a pig. In todays terms that would value a pig at app €2500. So you see what has happened to the price of food. And so back to my original point, why pay 50k an acre in order to lose money producing food??
 
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