Five unsold homes in Blackrock Affordable Housing scheme handed back to developer

Louth County Council will not be buying five houses that didn’t sell under the affordable purchase scheme at the Cois Farraige development at Blackrock for social housing, councillors were told at the April meeting of Dundalk Municipal Distriction.

Ten houses in the development had been available under the affordable purchase scheme for first-time buyers and others who cannot afford a mortgage to buy a house at its market rate.

While there had been eleven applications for people interested in the scheme, only five houses were eventually sold. The unsold houses will now revert to the developer to sell on the open market, Senior Executive Officer John Lawrence said.

Cllr Marianne Butler recalled that after the crash, the Council had ended up buying affordable houses and using them for social housing. She wondered if there was “any chance that we could buy these and use them as social housing.”

“We’re not going to do that,” replied Mr Lawrence. He said that in the past when the Council had looked to acquire property and sell it on as social housing, it had caused a lot of unhappiness that they had bought units that they couldn’t sell.

He said that they recognise when people are buying houses in a private estate development and will minimise the amount of social housing in those estates.

“It would be doing a disservice to people buying into a private estate,” he said.

He added that the current requirement under Part 5 is that 10pc of an estate is social housing and people know that.

When there is an affordable purchase scheme, the houses are being sold at a discount.

They were not going to have a 50/50 ratio of social housing in a private estate but could have 20/80 ratio.

In the case of the estate in Blackrock, they have to be sure that they’re not going to distort the market.