Threefold increase in holiday homes? Not quite…

A statistical debate over the real number of Malta's alleged 72,000 vacant dwellings has Malta's construction lobby excited.

While the Malta Developers Association says a survey by NSO director Michael Pace Ross claimed that 30,000 properties are being used as holiday homes, this claim has now been radically toned down by Pace Ross himself.

The National Office of Statistics has confirmed that the number of 'empty' homes used for a short period as "seasonal" or "secondary residences" amount to over 30,000, or more than 42% of the 72,000 vacant dwellings in the island.

But back in 2005, the national census had estimated 10,000 holiday homes on the island - suggesting that this number would have increased threefold in the last 10 years.

Faced with this figure, Pace Ross has now told MaltaToday that many of 30,000 properties are not necessarily holiday homes, that is: neither used as summer residences, nor as properties readily available for sale.

In a nutshell, these are empty houses, left vacant by family ownership feuds or forgotten by their owners.

Last Wednesday, the NSO survey led the Times of Malta to run the story that "half of Malta's 72,000 empty properties were summer residences".

In 2005, there were 10,133 holiday homes from the 53,136 vacant dwellings registered back then. This amounted to just 19% of all vacant properties at the time - a far cry from the 42% figure emerging from the latest statistics.

In reality the present statistics do not refer specifically to holiday homes, as happened in the 2005 census, but to properties used seasonally or for a "secondary use". 

So when asked by MaltaToday to explain the difference between a seasonal, or holiday home, and homes of secondary use, Pace Ross at first insisted that no distinction is made between seasonal and secondary use, because such concepts normally overlap. 

"These dwellings are only inhabited for a relatively short period of time throughout the year, and the inhabitants would stay in such dwellings after moving out from their usual place of residence, for a definite period of time."

Now Pace Ross has told MaltaToday the NSO will embark on further studies to distinguish between seasonal and secondary use, even if this "will take some time". 

According to Pace Ross only after such a study can a comparison with 2005 figures be made. "Naturally, the 10,133 in the 2005 census were strictly holiday dwellings.  These cannot be compared to the 30,000 figure in the present census".

Census figures in July showed that one-third of all properties in Malta are vacant, vindicating concerns raised by environmentalists who say this is enough reason to stop building more dwellings and apartment blocks. 

The new NSO data was however welcomed by the Malta Developers Association, which has always insisted that a large number of vacant properties were not available for sale on the market because these are either used as summer residences or are simply inhabitable.

And writing in today's edition of MaltaToday, MDA president Michael Falzon suggests that only 15,000 vacant properties are ready for habitation and already on the market. "The number of summer residences is practically 50% of the number of vacant properties," Falzon claims.

But the NSO's clarification that most of these seasonal properties are not summer homes does not challenge the MDA's contention that these cannot be put on the market, but indicates that a substantial number of people own a number of secondary properties - uninhabited, or used as stores perhaps.

Lifestyle choice or mass speculation?

Indeed, to go by the NSO data, the threefold increase in holiday homes would have suggested a dramatic change in lifestyle over the last eight years, with a large number of people embarking on a massive holiday home 'spending spree'.

The greatest absurdity was the fact that the sharp increase of 'seasonal' or 'secondary' homes indicated in the NSO data were empty houses in landlocked villages like Attard and Luqa.

What really changed is the NSO's definition of what constitutes a seasonal or a secondary home. In 2005 he distinction was between holiday homes, and completely vacant properties. The present census includes properties with a "secondary use".

A possibility is that the NSO included all properties kept vacant until owners transferred these homes to their heirs, or those houses kept deliberately vacant until the market conditions are right to put them out on sale. If anything, it suggests the long-term investment that property entails in Malta.

Fancy a holiday home in Luqa?

One way of knowing the growth in seasonal homes is publishing the figures for each locality. In 2005, 53% of these holiday homes were in the northern towns and Gozo, suggesting sea and rural getaways.

On the other hand, an increase in seasonal properties in the non-coastal localities suggests these properties are not summer homes.

According to the NSO, these statistics will be available next month in the published census. But data released in July already shows sharp increases in landlocked localities like Mgarr, Attard, Swieqi, Gharghur, Naxxar, Luqa, Fgura and Zabbar.

Attard, which witnessed an onslaught of new construction in the past years, saw its empty houses nearly double from 412 to 799 between 2005 and 2011. Luqa's climbed from 295 to 566, and Swieqi's from 714 to 1,345. In Fgura vacant properties increased from 488 to 858. None of these towns are seaside localities.

St Paul's Bay on the other hand, which had 4,467 holiday homes in 2005 still accounts for the highest number of vacant dwellings: 10,453. This means that in just six years, the number of vacant properties in the northern seaside town has shot up by 1,691.

Sliema registers the second-highest number of vacant properties: 4,061. Between 2005 and 2011, vacant properties in Sliema shot up by 1,394.

In Gozo the largest number of vacant properties is found in Zebbug, which borders the Marsalforn resort town. Empty homes here shot up byr 28% to reach 3,409. But landlocked Victoria has also registered a sharp 43% increase in vacant properties where 1,401 properties are now empty.