A new grant of up to €30,000 to help people who buy derelict properties to renovate and live in them is to be launched in the coming weeks.
News of the new grant were revealed by housing minister Darragh O'Brien this week.
Mr O'Brien is set to announce the financial support to tackle dereliction as part of a range of measures aimed at bringing more families into towns and villages.
"Vacancy is an untapped resource that we should be using," he told The Irish Examiner on Monday.
The new grant will be part of a multi-pronged approach to tackle unoccupied and dilapidated buildings across the country that will also look at planning difficulties relating to above-the-shop units.
Mr O'Brien said he intends to make greater use of the repair-and lease model as well as compulsory purchase orders (CPOs), and will make significant changes to the categorisation of protected structures in a bid to free up more properties currently not in use.
All of this work will come under a new dedicated vacancy unit in the Department of Housing.
In an interview with the Irish Examiner, Mr O'Brien said: "It will be a specific unit within my own department: a dedicated team on vacancy, which will be tasked with making sure we get our local authorities up to a consistent level of delivery, because vacancy heretofore was kind of thrown in with everything else."
On the rollout out a specific grant for families who purchase a vacant property, Mr O'Brien said: "I'll be bringing forward under Croí Cónaithe Towns and Villages, a grant for people who wish to buy a home to live in — this is a secondhand home obviously, and some of them are older homes — and provide a grant to help them do that home up as long as they live in it."
While the full details of the scheme, due to be announced in the first quarter of 2022, have yet to be finalised, it is understood that those who buy a vacant house will be able to secure funding of "in the region of €20,000 and €30,000" through their local authority towards renovation and other costs, a grant on par with the existing Help To Buy grant for new homes.
Mr O'Brien said a new scheme was being set up, as bringing vacant properties under the existing Help To Buy scheme would not have been feasible.
It is expected that the property would need to have not been used for a certain period, and also must be used as the main residence of those who buy it.
Mr O'Brien recently told the Dáil that a total of properties logged on the vacanthomes.ie website nationally stood at 6,263.
By contrast, the GeoView directory Q4 2020 report, which lists addresses in the State using data from An Post, found 92,251 vacant addresses in Ireland, representing 4.6% of all building stock.
Figures from Census 2016 showed there were 183,312 units, excluding holiday homes, vacant across the State in that year.
The minister said that targets will be set with each local authority, however, there is no centralised data on the exact number of vacant properties around the country.
He added: "The exact parameters of the scheme have to be fully agreed, but there would be stipulations around the age of the property and how long it has been vacant for."
