Buried in the Central Bank’s quarterly bulletin last week was the most important housing statistic of the year. It was not about prices, rents or completions. It was about time.
For homes finished so far in 2026, the average journey from planning application to completion was four years. A decade ago it was two. If time is the scarcest resource of all, then why on earth are we squandering so much of it?
Ten years ago the State aimed for 25,000 new homes a year. Today the target is around 50,000. The need has doubled. In any functioning system, delivery times would be falling to meet it. Instead, they have doubled.
I have spent 20 years investing in and selling property, and I have never seen a number that explains the crisis so completely. We count money in and homes out. Nobody counts the years in between, and that is where the delay lives and the costs rise.
Consider what doubling the delivery time does to the pipeline. If homes take four years instead of two, the country has to hold twice as many half-built schemes before output catches up with starts. The Central Bank has now confirmed that homes completed over the next two to three years will come mainly from what is already in the pipeline. The reality is stark. A planning application lodged this autumn will not become a home until 2030.
Then consider what those years cost. A builder carries land, design fees and finance through every month of the wait. Development finance is expensive, inflation continues to run hot, and every extra year lands in the price of the finished house or kills the scheme before it starts. The large developer absorbs this. The small builder in Tuam, Athenry or Loughrea cannot. I have seen many cases in recent years where a developer’s entire margin was eroded by the time the houses were handed over.
Where does the time go? A council is meant to decide a planning application in eight weeks. The typical decision on housing schemes that were never even appealed now takes about four and a half months. In 2017, one decision in five ran past four months. Today it is 56 per cent. That is before an appeal, a judicial review, or the long wait for water and grid connections. The clock is running out before the first block is laid.
The Planning and Development Act 2024 was supposed to fix this, and it does contain statutory decision periods, including 18 weeks for ordinary appeals to An Coimisiún Pleanála. But a deadline with no consequence is a suggestion. What is missing is accountability, and that is what Budget 2027 should buy.
Three things would do it. Publish a quarterly league table of decision times for every planning authority and the Commission, so voters can see where their county stands. Limit each application to one request for further information, because repeated requests have become the polite way of stopping the clock without saying no. And fund the planners, engineers and legal staff who are the bottleneck. Against €11.8 billion a year in housing, spending a few million on the people who turn permissions into homes is the best value in the whole Budget.
Above all, adopt the Central Bank’s measure as a national target. Publish delivery time every year. Commit to two years by 2030.
There has been real progress. Completions more than doubled between 2017 and last year, and over 100,000 homes have been commenced since 2024. That deserves credit. But a system that takes four years to turn a permission into a home cannot respond to a crisis. It can only report on it, four years late.
