Dublin Grants the Most Homes and Builds the Fewest

In Dublin City and Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, only 31% of units in large residential schemes granted between 2018 and 2023 have a linked commencement notice (the formal record that construction has actually started). Cork converts 68% of its permitted units. Galway manages 66%. Kildare, 58%. Dublin, where demand is strongest and prices are highest, converts the least.

How many Dublin permissions actually get built?

A planning permission is not a home. There is a gap between getting the permission and breaking ground, and in Dublin that gap is wider than anywhere else in the country.

The gap shows up at every scheme size, but it is widest for medium developments of 10 to 49 units, where Dublin trails the national rate by 24 percentage points. These are the schemes that sit in the hardest middle: too small to attract institutional funding, too large to rely on small-builder economics.

The absolute conversion rates understate true commencement, because the building-control-to-planning linkage is incomplete. But the same method applies to every council. The gap between Dublin and elsewhere is real, even if the exact percentages are conservative.

What's striking is how localised it is. DLR converts just 25% of large scheme units, the lowest rate of any council in the dataset. DCC is at 32%. But Fingal, right next door, converts at 58%, close to the national average. This is not a Dublin-wide issue. It is concentrated in the urban core, where land costs the most and where apartment-led schemes dominate.

Is the conversion rate getting worse?

The conversion rate is not just low. It is falling.

The 2018 and 2019 cohorts have had five to six years to commence. Any further improvement from here is likely to be limited. DCC went from 45% to 18%. DLR hit 8.3% in 2022. At that point, this looks less like delayed construction than permissions the market, as it currently works, cannot turn into buildings.

Why aren't Dublin schemes viable despite high prices?

Here is where it gets confusing. If the problem were simply cost, you would expect Dublin to look like rural Ireland, where the numbers clearly do not work. But Dublin's prices are the highest in the country. The median new-build sells for €441k, 41% above the rest-of-country median.

So why is so little getting built where demand is strongest?

Because Dublin's marginal supply is increasingly apartments, not three-bedroom houses. The SCSI's all-in delivery cost for an apartment is roughly €400k. Dublin's median sale price of €441k leaves about 10% headroom. That margin has to cover developer risk, financing costs, planning delays, construction inflation, and anything else that goes wrong. For a lot of schemes, it is not enough.

That is from a 24-unit scheme in Dalkey, granted in 2019, still unbuilt. Dalkey. One of the most expensive addresses in the country. The same template language turns up across multiple DLR extension applications. The word is always unfeasible.

When a developer holding a permission in Dalkey calls the project unfeasible, the gap between sale prices and delivery costs is worse than the headline medians suggest.

How many permitted units are about to expire?

Planning permissions are valid for five years. After that, they expire.

About 4,600 units in Dublin Metro, granted in 2020 and 2021, face expiry within the next 18 months with no linked commencement notice (estimated from decision date plus five years, since Dublin councils do not publish actual expiry dates). Another 12,800 units from 2018 and 2019 grants have already passed the five-year mark.

Some of these will have been extended. Some will commence late. But 17,000 permitted units approaching or past expiry without evidence of construction is hard to read as anything other than a systemic problem.

What does this mean before you submit?

If you are developing a large scheme in DCC or DLR, the conversion data is blunt: fewer than one in three permitted schemes in these councils actually start construction. Your scheme needs to work at today's costs, not the costs you assumed when you applied. If you are sitting on an uncommenced permission, the clock is running.

Fingal and parts of the commuter belt look materially healthier, with conversion rates in the 52 to 58% range. But the broader trend since 2018 is downward, so the gap may widen further if viability worsens.

For anyone modelling Dublin housing supply: the headline number of "permitted units" overstates actual delivery. At current observed conversion rates, 60 to 70% of Dublin's permitted apartment pipeline may never translate into commencements. If you are using permitted units as a supply forecast, discount heavily.

The policy implication is uncomfortable. Even if permission is being granted more readily than before, this analysis suggests the dominant constraint is post-permission: construction costs, financing, and the thin margin between Dublin apartment prices and delivery costs. Planning reform alone does not close this gap, though planning delays, conditions, and design constraints may still contribute at the margins. The Viability Series documents this dynamic nationally — outside Dublin, the gap between delivery costs and sale prices is wider still.