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“AS SOON AS I get my keys, the first thing I’ll do is register with the Bürgeramt”, our friend John told us at the weekend as he prepared for his move from Clare to Berlin.
Telling the local authorities that you’ve moved into your new home is an alien concept in Ireland. Because we lack this relatively straightforward step, we know so little about our housing stock and its uses, especially in comparison to our European neighbours. This is wasting a lot of time and money and is hindering our ability to respond to the ongoing housing emergency, as well as the vacancy and dereliction crises.
In Germany, registering your new address is a legal requirement for everyone, whether you are moving to the country for the first time, like John, or whether you are moving within the same neighbourhood.
You cannot get your internet or electricity connected without this registration, nor can you access the country’s public healthcare services. In fact, if you don’t register within 14 days, you could be fined up to €1,000. While some cities offer online registration, others still require an in-person appointment.
Germany is not alone with its address registration system. For example, in Belgium, a neighbourhood police officer visits your home post registration to verify you are living there and welcome you to the community.
So why do Germany, Belgium and so many other European countries like the Netherlands, Spain, Austria, Poland and Italy choose to take on this administrative burden, continually registering and re-registering all addresses? Simply, it makes managing public services much easier, more dynamic and more efficient. It means education, healthcare, transport and emergency services can be adequately resourced in real time using up-to-date demographic data. It also gives the state and local authorities the ability to manage their existing housing stock by letting them know which homes are lived in full-time and which homes are not.
The lack of an address registration system in Ireland is severely restrictive. For example, we don’t know which homes are being used by students and are therefore empty outside of college terms. Which homes are only used for a few days, weeks or months of the year as private holiday homes. Which homes are being turned into tourist accommodation as short-term lets. And which homes are just lying empty when so many need a home.
We don’t even know which homes are privately rented out, as it’s estimated that 73,000 homes are missing from the RTB registration. It also means there is always confusion about when a new home is counted. When it’s connected to ESB? When it gets an Eircode? Or when? The reality is there’s no official record of when someone moves into their new home in Ireland.
Like many public services in Ireland, data on our buildings and land is disjointed, incomplete, conflicting or just non-existent. Since you can’t manage what you don’t measure or what you measure badly, it means we will always be debating the lack of data or data collection methods rather than the actual solutions to the housing crisis.
As the data centre capital of the world and as the Silicon Valley of Europe you would think we would be quickly solving these data challenges. So why aren’t we? Not doing so makes you wonder if it’s a deliberate decision, hindering transparency and accountability in how we manage our buildings and land. But who gains from this, because it’s not the wider society that benefits.
The recent RTÉ Prime Time on the incomplete Derelict Sites Registers is another example of how our lack of an address registration is wasting time and money. Despite having 36 years to register all the derelict properties in the country, every Council has drastically failed to do so.
Yet they are being tasked again to create a national register for the new Derelict Property Tax, which will be collected by Revenue instead of the Councils. Likewise, Revenue failed to register all the vacant homes in the country when collecting the 2023 Vacant Home Tax (VHT), missing a “a whopping 97%” of them. Raising concerns that the VHT costs more to implement than what is actually collected.
Recent reports that the Department of Finance is looking to create a new definition of dereliction are worrying, because the country already has three legal definitions. There is the Derelict Sites Act that the Councils use, which defines dereliction as “likely to detract, to a material degree from the amenity, character or appearance of land in the neighbourhood”. Then there’s the Vacant Homes Grant that defines dereliction as “structurally unsound and dangerous”. Revenue already defines it as “uninhabitable”, so owners get exempt from the Local Property tax.
All these siloed definitions and registers not only waste time and money, but they also ironically hinder the very policies designed to create more homes from existing buildings. Another example is the long-promised registry of Short Term Lets by Fáilte Ireland, which is set to be another expensive, siloed registry that once again will provide incomplete data.
The good news is that the solutions to all these data problems are not that far away in Ireland. As we pointed out to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Housing, Local Government & Heritage in their session on vacancy and dereliction last October, we do not need to create a whole new address registration system to gain vital insights into home use or to implement effective taxes and grants.
What we proposed is to build on the systems Revenue already employs. Through the Local Property Tax, it already has a list of most homes in Ireland and already knows which ones are primary residences and which homes are self-declared derelict/uninhabitable.
All they need to do is expand on these questions to register who lives in every home, with private rentals verified through RTB registration. Homes that are not a primary residence should be classified as either Holiday Homes, used as Short Term Lets verified with planning permission or as Vacant with proof of legitimate reasons provided (illness, death certificates, etc.). All uninhabitable homes should be deemed legally derelict. To support this, existing definitions and data sets should be amalgamated for use across all relevant policies and practices.
This expanded Revenue registration system could be verified by owners every year, as well as updated within a month of a change of residential/use status. Of course, there will be important ethical and privacy concerns that need to be addressed, but these are all surmountable. While there will be cultural inertia, within the government, civil service, public bodies and across some parts of Irish society, the good news is that we can produce a more effective home management system that will also help us efficiently manage public services. Meaning education, healthcare, public transport and emergency services will also gain considerable insight into current and future demand. Over time, this system can be expanded to include all property in Ireland, after all, buildings and land are not moving anywhere.
The question now is how to move this to the top of the policy agenda, stopping years of procrastination and resistance to produce a comprehensive and successful national registration system for housing.
We live with Dóchas that this can happen within the next year. Because without changing how we manage housing data in Ireland, we will continue to run around in circles, getting nowhere closer to filling all the homes in the country and, crucially, ensuring everyone has a home.
Jude Sherry and Dr Frank O’Connor are founders of anois.org, ffud.art and #DerelictIreland. They are part of a series of writers, academics and economists penning a weekly essay delving into the housing crisis and potential solutions.
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