In an attempt to address the practice of investment funds purchasing new homes in bulk, Sinn Féin has announced today that they intend to present a Dáil motion the following week.
The action follows last week’s Business Post news that an investment fund had purchased 46 of the 54 residences (85%) in a brand-new housing complex in north Dublin.
When the Dáil reconvenes on Wednesday following its Christmas break, Sinn Féin’s motion will be discussed.
In order to discourage the practice of bulk buying, the motion will attempt to impose a punitive tax—in this example, stamp duty—of at least 17% on residences purchased by investment funds. At the moment, stamp duty on these sales is 10%.
Pearse Doherty, TD, the finance spokesperson for Sinn Féin, stated that this has happened before and won’t be the final instance, using the recent Dublin incident as an example.
“Workers and families who have saved every euro they can to buy their first home have seen family homes disappear under the nose of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil as a result of their approval of these funds,” Doherty added.
A 10 percent stamp duty was imposed by the government in May 2021 on the wholesale acquisition of family houses by investment funds.
But the government introduced a contentious change in July 2021 that permits funds to avoid paying the 10% stamp duty if they return property to the state for social housing.
According to Doherty, Sinn Féin had cautioned that the charge was “too low to act as an effective deterrent” at the time.
According to Doherty, “house prices have risen by 28 percent since this Government took office, with a first-time buyer in Dublin now needing an income of €127,000 to buy a new home, and a first-time buyer in Dublin needing an income of €95,000.”
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