According to the 2006 Census the housing vacancy rate in Ireland was at 15%. Rates varied throughout the country with Dublin at 9.7% and rural counties such as Leitrim at 29%!
This is the first look at the spatial distribution of the now vacant properties that have been developed in Ireland since 2006.
This analysis is based on the latest GeoDirectory release (April 2009).
Additional work is underway on a more detailed look at various geographical areas -the Dublin region, commuter towns in the Mid-East and a rural county in the Border region.
Justin Gleeson
Ireland after NAMA 
December 2, 2009 at 4:50 pm
[…] a start, people may want to take a look at this map of vacant properties developed after 2006 – the national vacancy rate in 2006 was 15% but this updates the pattern with data on vacancies in […]
December 2, 2009 at 5:59 pm
Could we not import this data into Google Maps… would be very nice indeed..? Please email if it might be possible.
December 2, 2009 at 10:42 pm
The short answer is no. The data is extracted from geodirectory for which An Post and OSI hold copyright and they are plotted into the new small areas for Ireland, the copyright for which is held by OSI. We’re therefore not able to make either the data or boundary files freely available for use with Google maps. It would be nice to do so, but it took us a long time to simply negotiate being able to put the flat, uneditable map above online (and for which we’ve had to pay a fee hence the license number on the map). We rely on the data for our research and cannot jeopodise our access to it.
December 3, 2009 at 1:27 pm
It is a very interesting map. We appreciate your efforts! Two questions on how you did it.:
1. This is based on comparing two versions of geodirectory. My experience is that an address takes around a year and a half or maybe two years to get into the Geodirectory address checker on the An Post website. (Maybe this is atypical.)
To get an idea of how current the geodirectory data are, how does the geodirectory vacancy rate line up with the census vacancy rate on a national and county-by-county basis?
2. The Small Areas – Is this work all complete? Is it ‘working’ well?
Best of luck with the new blog!
December 3, 2009 at 2:28 pm
What consitutes a vacant house? I persume this is a completed home with the utilities connected.
Is there any way to gauage the volume of non-completions (ie works started – yet to be finished, utilities not connected).
My own anecdotal evidence from North Cork would suggest that every village has between 3-20 unfinished houses – unfinished housing estates.
The Map is very interesting. Thanks for your efforts
December 3, 2009 at 5:07 pm
Eamonn,
leave this with me – there is an ‘under-construction’ code within the database that may be used to filter out some unruly developments.
Perhaps you could give me some more details on a north cork village or town that you know of and we can test it out
Justin
December 3, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Antoin,
Thanks for your comments.
To start with – the best ‘official’ data we have on vacancies to date is from the 2006 Census. The national rate was set at 15% by the CSO. A house/apartment is classed as being ‘vacant’ by the enumerator.
In 2006 and there were 93,419 housing completions (DoEHLG) – many of these would have been captured in the Census but a lot would have been missed with the Census carried out in April ’06. Since then the number of annual completions have dropped off but figures for 2007 (78,027) and 2008 (51,724) were still very high. As a result of this we now have a hole in our residential ‘vacancy’ data from early 2006 until now – we all know there has been a huge amount of development during this period and perhaps quite a lot of overdevelopment, higher in some places than others.
GeoDirectory is probably the only other national dataset that can be used to try and gauge the level of vacancies throughout the country – it may not be as exact as a full Census but will certainly provide a useful visualisation of the spatial distribution of vacancy rates.
GeoDirectory has become a lot more accurate and updated on a timelier basis in recent years. Data is updated every quarter but generally it can take a whole year before all the new residential developments are captured on a national basis and entered into the database. The data in the map is based on all residential houses/apartments that have come into the database since 2006 – there may be a time lag but in general it will capture all the new development over the 3 year period. The vacancy code is based on survey information when the house/apartment was surveyed by OSi/An Post. We are meeting with GeoDirectory to get some more clarification on this. The spatial patterns on the map generally match the overall county level trends from the 06 census.
I’ll have a look at matching the vacancy rates in GeoDirectory with the 2006 Census rate figures at a county level and will post results.
The Small Areas – getting there. Still some work to be done by OSi but as far as I’m aware they are coming along nicely – approx 16,000 nationally. We only have them on a trial and research basis, still a beta version.
Justin
December 4, 2009 at 9:06 am
I find it amazing that on one hand the government are promoting the so called ‘smart economy’ and yet on the other hand data like this isn’t being made freely available to integrate ‘smartly’ with other online applications.
December 4, 2009 at 2:52 pm
ESB networks has good information on completions.
If they were so minded, they could also give information on vacancy rates for properties completed after a particular date, on the basis that any property with electricity usage of less than 50 euros per year is most likely vacant.
As I understand it, they have fairly exact positions on file for all their meter points, so you could map the whole thing fairly accurately onto small areas. There was a paper about their system presented at an ODTR meeting about 6 years ago in connection with postcodes, and it should be available on the ComReg website. I will dig it out if you can’t find it. Rumour is that this ESB data will be used to track down recalcitrant second-home-owners, to bill them for the non-principal-private-residence tax, although I do not know how well this will work in practice.
How accurately does an Post know if a house is vacant, and what trouble does he go to to find out? It could depend as much on the postman as the state of the local economy.
December 7, 2009 at 2:04 pm
Great map and very useful but the larger urban areas appear to be underrepresented here. Any chance of producing an accompanying cartogram version to capture the ratio to density distribution of residential units?
Brendan B
December 31, 2009 at 10:48 am
[…] (for example, with respect to the live register, public sector pay, house prices and office rents, residential vacancy rates, cross-border shopping, County Leitrim). It looks like 2010 is going to be another year of […]
January 18, 2010 at 1:06 pm
[…] apartments. The pattern of vacancies varies from 9.7% in Dublin up to 29% in Leitrim (see the map we posted here). Let’s assume that 10% of these properties are no longer vacant meaning that 194,880 still […]