ECONOMIST - AUTHOR - BROADCASTER

Let’s talk about urban dereliction. Walk around Dublin, Cork or Limerick and dereliction is everywhere. Close to The Irish Times offices large swathes of Dublin’s south inner city are run down, in need of repair, unoccupied and derelict. And while many buildings may look occupied on the ground floor, once you lift your gaze more often than not the third and fourth floors are falling down.

The same is the case for Cork from where I’m writing today. Walking the length of this lovely city west to east you see something similar all the way from the Mardyke to Custom House Quay, upper floors appear grossly under-utilised and, in the main, vacant. They are certainly not homes or apartments.

This week the influential magazine the Economist suggested that Dublin’s house prices are 25 per cent overvalued relative to long-term income. The Economist was one of the early sirens last time out, warning loudly about the Irish property market in 2003, so it has good form.

More worryingly, in the list of 22 cities, although Dublin was not the most overvalued capital city, it is the one that has experienced most rapid house price growth since 2012.

In the past seven years Dublin prices have increased 72.9 per cent, compared with 63 per cent for Berlin, 54 per cent for Sydney, 56 per cent for Auckland and 60 per cent for Vancouver. Although cities such as London and Paris are significantly overvalued, the British capital has seen falls in the past year, while Paris has always been expensive and has seen prices rise only 6 per cent in the whole of the past seven years.