Giving up the ghost? Ireland's haunted housing market

Photo: Valerieanex.com (via Architizer)

Ireland is far from the only country in the world with abandoned properties. From Florida's extravagant Versailles mansion, halted halfway through its opulent erection, to Spain's stunted developments, empty houses are a blight upon the world's recession-hit economies; a spectre of the boom-and-bust crisis that haunts many property markets.

There are three things, though, that make Ireland's ghost estates stand out from the spooky horde: Valérie Anex's photographs, which have just been published in a new book, are the first, a crisp, clean catalogue of a messy, burst bubble. Second is the fact that unlike many vacant estates across Europe and America, all of these houses are complete.

Indeed, the buildings are almost spotless, painted in bright colours and neatly awaiting occupants, like overlooked dollhouses in the middle of a large scale disaster.

The properties are so much a conscious reminder of the economy's past troubles, in fact, that Ireland has officially classed them as "ghost estates". The National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis award the status to any development with 10 or more empty homes, or a less-than-50 per cent occupancy rate. In 2010, there were approximately 2,800 abandoned projects across the state. Now, that number has been dramatically reduced, just as the Irish property market enjoys positive growth.

Figures from the Central Statistics Office show that house prices across Ireland climbed 8.5 per cent in April 2014 compared to April 2013, the 10th consecutive month of annual price increases. Dublin leads the increase, with a price rise of 18 per cent year-on-year.

With ghost estates down and prices up, the prospects are, it seems, strong. The truth is that the recovery has a long way to go, though: the decline in ghost towns is because local authorities have been demolishing sites found to have "no viable financial future", a spokesman told Bloomberg.

Outside of Dublin, meanwhile, the rest of Ireland saw prices climb just 1.3 per cent annually and fall 0.3 per cent month-on-month. Prices nationally remain 46 per cent below the 2007 peak, when the ghost estates were first built amid the property frenzy.

The future is looking positive, but as the country climbs back from the financial brink, but Valérie Anex's book is published, the phantom of the recession looms over Ireland's shoulder. What lessons will be learned as the ghost is busted?