There simply aren’t enough houses.

House prices have leapt across Ireland yet again, according to data presented in the latest quarterly Dafte.ie Irish House Price Report.

While the national average house price has shot up by 9%, houses in Cork City have seen an increase below the mean; 5.8%. This means that the average price one would be expected to pay for a house in Cork is now €307,464.

This makes Cork the third most expensive city for housing, coming in behind Galway (€316,000) and Dublin (€399,000).

As for County Cork, the average house price is now €258,358, an increase of over 12% on average prices this time last year.

Ronan Lyons, Associate Professor of Economics at Trinity College, noted with some anxiety the continuing trend of demand for housing far outstripping supply in Ireland.

“With Ireland registering population growth and net migration even during the worst of Covid19 pandemic, and with strong evidence of suppressed household formation, demand for housing is set to remain strong well past the short- and medium-term and into the middle of the century.

“Reasonable parameters for population, headship and obsolescence imply a need of roughly 50,000 new homes annually, for every year between 2016 and 2051. That is a need that transcends tenure modes – in other words, the 50,000 new homes are across owner-occupied, private rental and social housing sectors.

“To be on target for this, Ireland would have needed to have built 250,000 between 2016 and 2020. Instead, the country built fewer than 85,000. As the country emerges from the Covid19 pandemic, the chronic and worsening housing shortage looms large economically and politically.”

The report can be read in full here.