Check Out The Records Of The ‘Experts’ That Cheerlead For The Vulture Landlords Before You Heed Their Advice
Back in 2016, Éirígí started researching and highlighting the vulture takeover of Irish housing, culminating with the launch of the ground-breaking #TrackTheVultures online map. In the intervening five years an ever growing number of people have come to see the devastating role that the vultures are having on, not just the provision of affordable housing, but on Irish society.
Given the fully deserved bad press they are now getting it is not surprising that the vulture landlords have commenced a publicity counter-offensive. Luckily for them there is no shortage of Irish housing ‘experts’ who are willing to bat for them.
Karl Deeter, one of a cohort of pro-vulture ‘experts’ who are given unlimited access to state and private corporate media
One of the most consistent defenders of light-touch governance of housing is Karl Deeter, the financial advisor, pop musician, newspaper columnist and housing ‘expert’. His musical output may be patchy but he has a Grammy in singing his support for a private-sector / profit driven approach to housing.
In one of his most recent insights, Karl expressed concern that the Dublin government’s proposed ban on vulture landlords buying up entire housing estates “may actually prevent housing” from being built.
According to Karl, the vulture landlords '“are the ones supplying housing whether you like it or not” and the state should stop introducing “additional complicated rules” and “let the people that build houses, build houses.” This free-for-all approach will, Karl predicts, result in higher volumes of new homes being built and subsequently greater affordability. Hmmmm.
In February 2008, as the world slid into the greatest recession since the 1920s, Karl made another prediction. In a piece entitled ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, he told readers to “keep the faith”, assuring them that the “average recession doesn’t even last a year, the average boom lasts five years, if you got stung just sit it out for a while and get planning for the five-year good times, and soon may they arrive!”
Karl was completely wrong about the devastating scale of the 2008 financial collapse and he’s wrong about the vulture landlords in 2021.
John Fitzgerald, in his role within the ESRI failed to predict the imminent and catastrophic collapse of the Celtic Tiger-era housing and banking sectors
Another one of our betters who is fond of lecturing us on housing policy is John Fitzgerald, former head of the Economic and Social Research Institure (ESRI). Writing in the Irish Times recently he strongly argued against rent controls and in favour of vulture landlords.
John is urging people to just accept the apparent fact that “institutional investment will be needed to scale up our housing stock” and that “those who invest in new rental housing need to be reasonably certain that they can earn an equivalent return from providing new housing to what they could earn from alternative investment opportunities. Otherwise, no one would provide those new residential buildings we badly need.”
When he was working for the ESRI, it was John’s job is to make economic predictions to guide government policy. This was apparently impossible to do, so during John’s tenure, the ESRI decided to start giving multiple predictions for any given year.
But even with these multiple predictions, John and ERSI got it spectacularly wrong in relation to the property bubble and the collapse of the entire private banking sector. Seven years later, Fitzgerald admitted that “I failed to foresee the impending financial collapse…We made a call that Ireland would probably escape it and we were totally wrong…”
John’s ‘big mistake’ wasn’t some abstract, academic error. It had devastating real-world implications as critical government decisions were at least partly-informed by John and ERSI deeply-flawed analysis and projections.
John was wrong about the 2008 housing and financial collapse. And he’s wrong about the vulture landlords in 2021.
We shouldn’t be too harsh on John though. His brother is the ‘Fitz’ in estate agent giants Sherry Fitzgerald, so maybe he didn’t want to upset his sibling relations by being the bearer of bad news.
Ronan Lyons of Daft.ie routinely advocates for the state to facilitate vulture landlord expansion
Ronan Lyons of Trinity College and co-founder of Daft.ie is another housing ‘expert’ that doubles up as cheerleader for the vulture landlords. Like Karl and John, Ronan is imploring us all to accept the vulture takeover of housing as a fait accompli - an undeniable and unchangeable reality that must be accepted by all right-thinking people.
In a recent article in The Irish Examiner, Ronan told us that "with a severe shortage of rental accommodation, Ireland badly needs the tens of thousands of new rental homes the so-called 'cuckoo funds' plan to build over the coming years”
Ronan pointed to the chronic the lack of homes to rent on Daft.ie as adequate reason for laying out the red carpet for the vultures. Despite his position in academia, Ronans research skills leave something to be desired, as the Irish Times soon pointed out.
It turns out that Daft.ie have been under-counting the number of rental properties that are actually available to rent. Ironically this under-counting relates specifically to vulture-landlord-owned housing developments were Daft.ie only counted the number of home types that were available to rent in a given development and not the actual number of homes.
Omitting vacant properties in vulture-landlord-owned developments critically undermines the credibility of the Daft.ie data and the argument that Ronan built on that data. Ronan and Daft.ie have also failed to factor in the impact of vulture landlords routinely leaving homes empty rather than accepting a lower rent.
These omissions are in keeping with Daft.ie’s long history of favouring landlords over tenants. For many years the website facilitated discrimination against those on low incomes by including a ban on welfare recipients accessing rental homes if the landlord so desired - a practice which was eventually made illegal.
Karl, John and Ronan are just three members of a much larger cohort of high profile economists, journalists, academics and other ‘experts’ who use suspect data, questionable analysis and their own subjective opinion to influence public opinion and government policy.
Collectively they are given daily access to print and broadcast media to promote economic “facts” that are much closer to voodoo than science. The fact that many of these talking heads have vested financial interests in the housing status quo — interests that will rise or fall depending on the government policy they seek to influence - is rarely mentioned.
Little wonder that these ‘experts’ never speak out against private-sector dominated housing or against the interests of land-owners, developers, estate agents, bankers, estate agents, solicitors, landlords and others who have grown obscenely rich from the current approach to housing.
Nor is it unsurprising that none of them speak in favour of Universal Public Housing or any other model of not-for-profit housing that would damage their own economic interests.
The housing revolution that Ireland needs will never come from these ‘experts’ or from the political establishment they seek to influence. Instead change will come from the bottom up - from citizens getting organised and fighting for a housing system that puts the needs of the many ahead of the greed of the few who profit from the current housing misery.
Éirígí has been to the fore of pushing back against the vulture takeover and the fight for Universal Public Housing for the last five years. If you’re ready to join us in the fight for housing justice, please get in touch today.