Why housebuilding figures aren’t reliable

Whatever metric you use, it is clear Ireland has major issues when it comes to measuring housing activity

Homelessness and housing are receiving a lot of attention at the moment. Serious doubts have emerged about government statistics and therefore, our capacity to hit the targets set by the Rebuilding Ireland programme. Do we really know how many homes we’re building?

Official house completions figures are calculated using connections to the ESB network. Using this metric, the Department of Housing claims that 14,932 new homes were “delivered” last year.

There are significant ...