Asking prices surge as homebuilding falls far short of target required

“Asking prices” are rising at their fastest rate in two years in the property market, and one in seven homes is selling for 20 per cent above those figures, according to the latest quarterly house price report from MyHome.ie. It says asking prices are now 7.5 per cent up on the same time last year, writes Laura Slattery.
Another report on the sector, from Sherry FitzGerald, says the Government target for annual home completions needs to double in the short term if it hopes to close the gap between supply and demand. Boss Marian Finnegan says we need to build 62,000 homes a year and bemoans the failure of Budget 2025 to target a way of funding that level of development, reports Fiona Keeley. The report also says prices for second-hand homes are rising twice as fast as this time last year.
Away from the property market and to the world of work where Pilita Clark writes that fighting over whose name should go first on a report or an email might sound petty – and in some ways it is – but research shows there is good reason white-collar office workers can get so obsessed with such detail.
PwC’s quarterly insolvencies barometer says business failures in the retail sector jumped in the third quarter. The figures also confirm the hospitality sector’s struggles. Although absolute numbers are less than in retail, it is seeing twice the rate of collapse in terms of failures per 10,000 businesses. Laura Slattery writes that PwC sees little room for optimism in either sector over the next six months with 900 businesses expected to go to the wall this year and the first quarter of next year primed for a surge in business failures.
Galway medtech firm, SymPhysis Medical, which has developed a device that makes it easier for late-stage cancer patients to treat a common complication, fluid in the chest, without being stuck in hospital all the time, has raised another €2.2 million as it prepares to pitch for US regulatory clearance. Ian Curran has the details.
Minister for Social Protection Heather Humphreys says she will “shortly” begin the search for investment firms to manage assets under auto-enrolment (AE) after she this week signs a commencement order that will see the long-delayed mandatory workplace pension scheme begin operations at the end of September next year.
In our Opinion slot, PwC Ireland head of tax Paraic Burke says Budget 2025 was a missed opportunity to simplify Ireland’s increasingly complex corporate tax code and ease burden on business.
Also looking at new approaches, Martin Sandbu says that, while virtually everyone agrees that most of former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi’s recommendations for raising productivity growth across the European Union are good ones, hardly anyone expects that member states to reach the agreement needed to realise them. His answer: a group of nine like-minded states – including Ireland – need to lead the way.
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