Auctioneer Kay McGuire is the newly appointed IPAV Junior Vice-President
A Mayo woman, who is the new Junior Vice-President of IPAV, the Institute of Professional Auctioneers and Valuers, has said housing policy needs a ‘paradigm shift’.
Kay McGuire, who is from Kilmaine, is Managing Director of Galway Property Services, and has said the shift must address a number of persistent problems that have hampered property supply and affordability.
Speaking at the organisation’s annual conference in Limerick, Ms McGuire called last month’s Housing Commission Report ‘a blueprint’ to address persistent impediments, particularly those involving planning, the provision of infrastructure, approval processes by State organisations and financing both within the State sector and elsewhere.
“Initiated by the Government, this report has taken two and a half years of consideration. It must not be allowed to lie gathering dust amongst the libraries of reports on housing,” she said.
The Property Management lecturer at TU Dublin added: “The Government might not agree with some of the recommendations, but that’s okay, Commission members themselves didn’t always agree. Find alternatives. The critical thing is that they embrace the need for urgency.”
In this regard, what was crucial to effecting the shift needed was bringing together the varying elements of the State housing apparatus.
“Currently we have a single Government Department responsible for Housing - in name, and we have other Government Departments with involvement in particular areas of housing, including Finance; Justice and Social Protection, to name but three,” she said.
“We have Local Authorities acting largely independently, often even within their own particular areas of responsibility,” Ms McGuire continued.
She said it was ‘critical’ that a more cohesive structure was set up urgently and that it would be time lined, even if it’s not the precise Housing Delivery Oversight Executive recommended in the Commission Report.
“Whatever the mechanism, housing policy must be coordinated, given whole of Government attention, and urgently. Otherwise, we will not succeed in delivering the 212,500 to 256,000 homes deficit identified in the report,” she warned.
Speaking about the property market in Mayo, Ms McGuire addressed the Real Estate Alliance’s recent report that 20 percent of all sales in the county in the first quarter of 2024 were Landlords leaving the market.
“Whilst many of these houses will have been purchased by owner occupiers, which is wonderful, this level of loss of stock to the rental market is not sustainable as continued lack of properties on the rental market continues to put upward pressures on rents,” Ms McGuire concluded.
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