Clúid Housing – Building The Next 25 Years As 2019 moves swiftly into 2020, Clúid Housing – Ireland’s largest Approved Housing Body (AHB) – moves into its 26th year. With that in mind, the association is planning on how to build on a quarter century which has seen it go from a few houses in Clondalkin to over 7,000 across the country.Clúid Housing’s new Corporate Strategy, Building Focus, brings us from 2019 up to 2022 and is a clear statement of how we will focus our energies and resources in the next three years as we fulfil our mandate as an organisation. While Clúid Housing operates only in the social rented area of the housing market, we are acutely aware of the interconnectedness of the different housing tenures, which means that difficulties in one part impacts on all other parts. Demand far exceeds supply across all parts of the housing market, so this all-encompassing approach is an important focus in our future planning, for the knock-on effect alone.
This approach is reflected in our identifying objectives which we feel benefit the sector as a whole. A headline objective for us is to resource efforts to create a sustainable intermediate rental sector, to assist in stabilising the housing market. A central goal of our strategy is to develop an intermediate rental model. A number of models are currently being explored, including cost rental, which relates rental payments to the cost of provision, and affordable rental, which relates rents to the market rent and tenant’s ability to pay. The benefits of developing intermediate renting include: Providing housing to meet a neglected need; Contributing to securing our business through a diverse offering; and enabling us to develop larger mixed tenure sites.Intermediate rental will be generated in two ways: through the conversion of existing social housing in areas with a high density of social housing and through undertaking new intermediate rental housing. The model we will adopt will be one which enables us to consistently develop a viable and replicable model.
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