It does not matter who owns them. If there is enough housing, investments funds will lower rents to match the demand. Investment funds can do excessive rent seeking only if the supply is limited. It's good if foreigners invest in housing, because hoses can't be moved overseas.
Anyone disagreeing, argue against this statement:
Exess rent seeking is possible only when there is scarcity.
When people don't have choises, they must pay what is asked. If you have 100 people needing a house and 101 houses available, prices will decline. Maintaining empty house is a running loss and house prices and rents will decline to prevent that.
That's an impressive figure: The second largest city/settlement in Ireland, Belfast, has a population of about 350,000. If these new homes house three people each (a family with one child), it means that Ireland is growing at a speed of almost a new Belfast per year.
Is the economy growing at a similar speed to support eight or nine more Belfasts in the next 10 years?
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2025/02/05/republic-need...
The issue is as much a legacy of lack of investment as growth, as for a number of decades the state built no houses at all, forcing a generation into rental poverty.
What is required is that the many legal and financial barriers that exist to the economically-viable building of apartments and houses need to be dismantled. If we could have tens of thousands of new dwelling places made available each year, the asking prices for housing stock would start to gently decline. Society as a whole would accept this as a social good.
The only place in the developed world where housing prices have declined (or even remained stagnant) over the long term is Japan, a country in long term recession.
I wrote about this in detail here - https://garethstack.com/2015/10/28/by-believing-passionately...
It is almost impossible to receive housing benefit in Ireland. Legally all landlords must accept it, practically few to none in major cities do.
> The pricing of housing is defined by supply and demand.
About 20% of Irish homes are bought by investment funds, another huge (difficult to specify) percentage are bought to rent by small to medium sized landlords. The Irish state Land Development Agency build around 3.5k homes per year, meanwhile Davies estimate the state needs around 93k new homes per year. Investing in any kind of investment fund or ETFs is taxed at 41% under the exit tax in Ireland. In addition, the “deemed disposal” rule means investments are taxed as though sold every eight years, even if they haven't been.
These are all artificial extreme pressures on housing in Ireland specifically, that mean that this is not a simple 'supply and demand' problem. It's a supply and demand of people who need housing vs entities who require profit - and have concomitant class affiliations and monies to spend on political influence problem.