Just over five years ago in April 2021, Ciaran Fitzpatrick’s only active construction project was a 34-home housing estate in Birr, Co Offaly.
“We had a couple of hundred homes in our pipeline back then,” the chief executive of Fitzpatrick & Heavey Homes tells The Irish Times. “In 2023, we decided to scale up and went from one site to four sites. Now we have seven different construction sites at the moment.”
Those deals in 2023 for land in Offaly, Cork, Westmeath and Wicklow, all signed within a couple of months, have elevated Fitzpatrick & Heavey Homes from a small developer into a company with 650 homes under construction now.
“It has really ramped up over a five-year period. Between 2023 and 2025, we aimed to have 500 or 600 units, or as close to 1,000 units, under construction as we could. That was our second phase of the business” Fitzpatrick says. “Then in 2025 we moved on and focused on acquiring as many large landbanks as we can, which would be a minimum of 1,000 at a time.”
RM Block
Purchases of further land in Meath, Galway and Cavan mean Fitzpatrick & Heavey Homes now has a total of 4,168 homes in its pipeline.
“We’re trying to get to a point where we are developing north, south, east and west of the country, and all in-house from start to finish. That means wherever opportunities come up we can take them,” he says.
“So if the demand increases in a part of the country, we speed up construction to match it and if it slows down in a region we can refocus the business.”
While this is a significant level of construction, Fitzpatrick & Heavey Homes is still off the pace of the country’s biggest home builders.
Stock market-listed Glenveagh is expected to complete 2,750 homes this year. Cairn Homes has forecast it will deliver 6,000 new homes across 2026 and 2027.
Other members of the top five residential developers, which have often completed in the high hundreds or just over 1,000 homes a year, are: the Texan-backed Irish builder Evara, led by Michael Hynes; Joe O’Reilly’s development company Castlethorn; and O’Flynn Group, the Cork-based builder controlled by veteran developer Michael O’Flynn.
Beyond the top five, other notable players include Harcourt Developments, which has recently built large housing estates in Citywest, and Johnny Ronan’s former business partner Richard Barrett and his firm Bartra, which has redeveloped the O’Devaney Gardens site in Dublin 7 and some co-living schemes in Dublin.
Pat Crean’s development company Marlet has a track record in large-scale apartment delivery in Dublin as does the Cotter family’s Park Developments, which has large apartment projects and housing estates under way in Dublin and Cork.
Sean Mulryan’s Ballymore also has a long-established record, building 15,000 homes in Ireland over a number of decades and last year it announced plans to build up to 4,000 more following a refinancing deal worth €130 million with AIB.
In April, KPMG’s report, The Scaling Challenge, looked at more than 4,100 active planning applications and data on 99,196 completed homes between December 2020 and December 2025 to assess the scale of the house building sector.
Commissioned by Home Building Finance Ireland, the research found the industry was highly fragmented. Close to 90 per cent of Irish developers built fewer than 50 homes a year and two-thirds built fewer than 10 units annually in the period.
Only 11 developers consistently delivered more than 300 homes a year and accounted for 32 per cent of the 99,000 homes delivered in the five-year period, while medium-sized developers who built more than 50 a year delivered around 26.5 per cent of new stock.
Two-and-a-half-years ago, a similar analysis by Goodbody chief economist and member of the state’s Housing Commission Dermot O’Leary also showed a “distinct lack of scale” in the sector, which has been “predominately made up of a large number of smaller builders”.
Cairn Homes and Glenveagh were behind 12 per of the total homes started in 2023, while the top 10 residential developers accounted for 32 per cent of total construction commencements in Ireland in 2023 compared with 42 per cent in the UK.
“The motivation of the research into this lack of scale was actually to try to quantify it,” O’Leary says. “Several years later the concentration is still very apparent. There has been some scaling up of the second-tier developers, but the follow-on question now is: what’s holding them back?”
A survey of home builders in Ireland, published by Goodbody in April, found land availability was cited as the main factor holding respondents back from scaling their company.
“They said it was planning the previous year, followed by land,” O’Leary says. “Now it has flipped to land followed by planning.”
The difficulty finding sites to develop has caused some developers, such as Twinlite director Rick Larkin, to walk away from residential construction.
Last April Larkin said the Government had “regulated the market to failure”.
In the past 18 months Minister for Housing James Browne has announced reforms to rent controls, changes to apartments and a VAT cut for apartment construction to address some concerns of builders.
Due to uncertainty in the sector, Larkin’s firm has now set its sights away from residential development and towards hotel and student housing at the Phibsborough Shopping Centre, Dublin.
This year KPMG’s report also surveyed 40 developers and contractors on constraints they faced to expanding output. Medium-sized developers all cited “planning uncertainty” as their top impediment to scaling their home-building activity, followed by on-site infrastructure and then land availability.
Analysis by O’Leary has shown the State has enough zoned land for its housing goals, but “it’s in the wrong place”.
“There’s a lot of zoned, serviced land in the west of the country, but in the east and midlands, where the majority of home-building activity has been happening, there is not.”
Browne has told local authorities to zone more residential land to alleviate developers’ concerns. Last year, Taoiseach Micheál Martin criticised some councils for “inertia” and “lack of proactivity” on this objective to zone more land, but local authorities’ work on zoning is expected to be completed by the end of this year.
Irish Home Builders Association (IHBA) director Conor O’Connell says this should alleviate some issues builders have faced in scaling their output.
“We hope, and expect, an awful lot of opportunity for medium-sized builders, in particular, to buy new land zoned for housing.”
However, O’Connell says that getting access to residentially zoned land would not allow builders to ramp up their activity overnight.
“When we’re talking about these medium-sized builders upscaling, it would be a big assumption to presume the infrastructure will be in place and that land will get through the planning system quicker,” he says.
“There are many medium-sized builders who are ready and willing to scale up, which could be quite a significant transformation for annual completion numbers, but we are still concerned about the pipeline from the middle of 2027 onwards. That’s why there’s so much pressure on getting more land zoned now, infrastructure in place quicker and the planning piece at the moment.
“But, given that we’re on an upward momentum at the moment, you could see quite a significant growth in those medium-sized builders over the next number of years.”
As Fitzpatrick & Heavey Homes scaled up in recent years, the company faced some difficulty finding sites to buy, but Fitzpatrick says that has started to ease.
Land-zoning processes have already begun to free up more sites for development and made landowners keen to engage, he says.
“Getting land has been a challenge, but we can see that is changing fairly rapidly. A lot of local authorities are obviously zoning a lot more land, which means that our deal flow has increased fairly significantly over the last three months in particular,” Fitzpatrick says.
“A lot of people were maybe sitting on land. Landowners actually didn’t want to get land zoned, but now it is getting zoned so they have to deal with companies like ourselves who can bring their site through a planning process all the way to completion.”
Fitzpatrick’s firm has been able to circumnavigate some scaling issues developers face because it has been in a position to self-finance deals for land.
“We’ve had to finance all the land acquisition purchases ourselves, so every site we bought we had to fund it in-house and then we’ll obviously work with several different funders for the work-in-progress finance.”
Few SME developers have access to the funds to buy land or the means to raise capital to do so.
Limited access to equity was cited in KPMG’s report as the fourth-biggest impediment developers have faced when trying to scale. Goodbody’s survey also cited it as a barrier to smaller developers expanding their output.
“Probably one of the biggest challenges for many medium-sized builders at the moment is finding the equity to buy the land,” O’Connell of the IHBA says.
“In order to even get to the construction stage or apply for construction finance, you need a parcel of land, and builders need to bring some equity to the table to make that purchase happen, which can be quite challenging.”
Fitzpatrick says the building sector will only be able to respond to the Government’s push to zone more land if developers can get finance to buy sites.
“Having significant amounts of land available to develop will only convert into homes if there is finance to buy the land,” he says.
“A big challenge for us is having to finance land acquisitions in-house. We would love a scenario where us or other developers can identify strategic land banks where we can deliver 1,000 plus homes and there’s additional finance available for us to acquire quickly.”
Home Building Finance Ireland, a State agency established in 2018, has lent more than €3.8 billion to support the delivery of almost 20,000 homes, but this is construction finance.
Fitzpatrick says there is a need for further Government intervention at the land-buying stage of the development process to accelerate building activity.
“An Enterprise Ireland-style agency for developers that would help small builders scale up very significantly would be helpful. We’d love to see something like that, which could help us move on and scale up much more rapidly,” he says.
O’Connell says that once the rezoning matter has been resolved the focus of the sector will move on to how it can address the equity, or financing, issue.
“We do expect that the equity piece and financing of residential development will become more important over the next year or two, but what is promising is there are many medium-sized builders out there who want to grow,” he says.
“Talk to any developer and they will tell you they are willing to scale up, so we could be about to see a significant transformation of the numbers of homes being delivered over the next number of years if they can get the finance to buy land.”
In March, part of the motivation behind the State’s attendance and investment in attending the MIPIM property conference in Cannes, France, was to find foreign funds and banks that would come to Ireland to provide this equity for developers at early stages of the development process.
The State is looking for more funds such as Avenue Capital, a large US investment firm that has backed Patrick Durkan’s development firm D/Res, to make some significant land purchases.
Goodbody’s O’Leary says there are other Avenue Capital-style funds looking for the right Irish developers to partner with.
“There is a demand from investors internationally to support platforms. Right now, they’re just trying to find the right horse to back,” he says.
“We’ve seen this most visibly with the Avenue Capital equity that’s coming into the system now. Certainly what we hear is others would like to get involved if they can find a platform or builder they could back from an equity perspective.”
Property Industry Ireland director David Howard says the entry of new funds to Ireland to finance that equity part of the development process will be dependent on lenders seeing stable conditions in Ireland.
“What we’re seeing is funders are not out in the market to take risk at the moment,” he says.
“New equity funders coming to help finance land-acquisition is dependent on them seeing our planning system is working, that newly zoned lands can be built on quickly and infrastructure coming on stream. When those are all working well, projects will be attractive for equity funding.
“So until we see those resolved and flow through to the market, people will be hesitant to actually sign off on financing.”
More finance for developers to buy landbanks could heat up competition in the market even further, but Fitzpatrick feels there is plenty of space in the sector for other builders to grow without squeezing each other out.
“Even if you just look at the numbers of homes required, we’re looking at a need for 50,000, 60,000 or 70,000 homes a year going forward. This year looks like the sector will deliver maybe 40,000 homes, so there’s plenty of scope for existing developers to scale up or new developers enter the market.”
The Government has targeted the completion of 300,000 new homes between 2025 and 2030. Last year, there were 36,284 homes built in Ireland. It’s unclear if annual output can rise to the 50,000 or 60,000 output needed annually to hit the 300,000 goal, but developers appear to be individually optimistic that their output will rise in the coming years.
Goodbody’s survey found 72 per cent of home builders expect to build more homes this year compared to 2025. Most of those have forecast their output will increase by more than 20 per cent.
Respondents also showed optimism for 2027, as 86 per cent said their building activity would rise that year, too. The scale of increase varied, with a third expecting an increase of more than 30 per cent and a quarter forecasting an increase of up to 10 per cent.
Will the sector have the necessary labour to build these homes?
Research published by Property Industry Ireland in February shows Ireland had 177,600 people working in construction, which was 54,400 below the peak employment level in the industry in 2007 (a year before the property crash), with the majority focused on residential delivery.
Howard says that for the country to meet all housing, infrastructure, retrofitting and National Development Plan projects, the sector requires 95,000 to 110,000 extra workers. It’s a huge number.
Home builders themselves, however, are bullish that the sector has the capacity to build 50,000 homes annually. In the past year, Glenveagh chief Stephen Garvey and Cairn Homes CEO Michael Stanley have both said labour shortages were not holding back the industry.
O’Connell says even if developers are not showing the scale in their output or balance sheets right now, the house building sector has the capacity to significantly increase its output.
“Capacity is definitely not the issue at the moment. If we look at labour capacity on its own, without talking about finance, planning or infrastructure, it was only in the fourth quarter of 2023 that there were 90,000 people working in residential construction. That has increased already to 120,000 people in residential construction this year.
“We have challenges and need to attract new people, but the capacity is there and willingness is there to expand.”
