http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv3km20JH0U

hehe Jani i know the link is slightly offtopic but i thought id contribute this for some light relief

S. Ireland is really in the sh**, 651 empty housing estates, 1/5 empty houses. House prices dropped about 60%, banks reporting all Gov't bailout 'investment' money is gone never to be seen again. Prices of many things like building materials have escalated. There was also a new empty housing estate in N.Ireland on TV, maybe 1 occupied, one couple bought and moved in but had to move out because of rats and vandalism. Made themselves bankrupt to move on.

Ride_on wrote:S. Ireland is really in the sh**, 651 empty housing estates, 1/5 empty houses. House prices dropped about 60%, banks reporting all Gov't bailout 'investment' money is gone never to be seen again. Prices of many things like building materials have escalated. There was also a new empty housing estate in N.Ireland on TV, maybe 1 occupied, one couple bought and moved in but had to move out because of rats and vandalism. Made themselves bankrupt to move on.

We have thousands of empty flats (actually nobody knows how much, but estimate is well over 10 000), but also alone in our capital city there are 6000 homeless because there are no houses/flats. That would mean that in New York there should be 96 000 homeless to get similar ratio, but in New York there is only around 40 000 homeless.

There are practically no homeless problem at rest of country, sure there is 2000 homeless in whole country if we exclude our capital city, so that tells something how sick our housing market is in our capital city and if that bubble bursts it affects to housing in whole country.

Surely number of empty houses is not too great compared to number of households, we have something like 2.5 million households and number of empty houses of that is probably 0.5% if I got my percentage calculation correct, so empty houses is not big issue, price bubble and homeless people are more of so.