Dublin City Council publishes a live map of its 147 derelict sites — 23 of them owned by the council itself — and the state's Land Development Agency maps public landholdings with their registered owners, so the owners of empty and underused property are unusually visible. Over 13,000 permitted homes sit on sites where nothing has started, and the council is now looking to sell or hand on the derelict houses it bought but could not afford to fix.
Vacant office space597,700 m²13.9% of the stock stands empty
On the map2,019buildings and sites from 10 open sources
Homes potential≈ 1,630if 30% of empty offices converted
Office figures: Colliers, Q2 2026 — 13.9% vacancy (12.2% excluding reserved space) applied to about 4.3 million m² of offices (Central Bank of Ireland from CBRE data, end-2024); vacant area = stock × rate, an estimate across two publishers and dates.. Homes: our economic model’s conversion engine. Map built 2026-10-06.
Switch layers on by the question you are asking. Every point comes from a public record, an open dataset or a cited report; open one to see where it comes from and what the data cannot tell us.
No open aerial imagery: Tailte Éireann orthophotos are licensed products and no open WMS covers the city, so building cards carry no aerial close-up.
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0 points · click a cluster to zoom, a point for its sources
Where to look first
Buildings with evidence that they stand empty — a second source agrees, a public record names them, or we have checked them — ranked by a score you can read: co-op scale, daylight depth, a station nearby, a zone that allows homes, affordable land and an open route in. Checked buildings carry their result; nobody has visited them on site yet.
Score
Building
Floor area
Station
Actions
58
6 Terrace Place Dublin 1Confirmed empty
Public building named vacant · 1 other source nearby
—
348 m
58
6 Creighton Street Dublin 2 D02CF66
Public building named vacant
—
283 m
58
11 Bass Place, Dublin 2, D02 R5P3
Public building named vacant · 4 other sources nearby
—
159 m
51
8 and 10 Ferguson Road, Drumcondra
Public building named vacant · 2 other sources nearby
—
863 m
51
30 Frederick Street North
Public building named vacant · 2 other sources nearby
—
961 m
51
39–40 Bridgefoot Street
Public building named vacant · 1 other source nearby
—
790 m
51
37 Thomas Court Dublin 8 D08T2R7
Public building named vacant · 3 other sources nearby
—
863 m
51
18 Cadogan Road Dublin 3 D03K650
Public building named vacant · 1 other source nearby
Public building named vacant · 2 other sources nearby
—
2,846 m
Districts where conversion makes sense
Where empty offices, the right zoning and a working neighbourhood come together — and what could go wrong.
The Liberties and Dublin 8
The most derelict sites of any postal district and the highest commercial vacancy in the city, next to the two big LDA projects that keep and reuse old buildings.
31 of the 147 derelict sites are in Dublin 8
Commercial vacancy 17.6% in Q2 2026, the highest in Dublin
Donore (542 homes, 389 cost rental) under construction; Pear Tree Crossing planned for over 550 homes
Risk: Many entries are single houses and small infill plots; protected structures make conversion slower and dearer.
Who controls the space, and what a housing cooperative can actually do with them.
Public owner
Dublin City Council — its own derelict and vacant houses
The council owns 23 sites on its Derelict Sites Register and 32 vacant Buy and Renew houses it cannot afford to fix. A disposal framework (reported in October 2025) offers unsold council properties first to the LDA, then to housing charities (approved housing bodies), then first-time buyers, then developers — a cooperative registered as an approved housing body is second in line.
The LDA register lists every public landholding (948 non-green-space parcels in the city, with the registered owner) and the LDA delivers cost-rental homes with the council. Use the register to find land held by state bodies (CIE, HSE, OPW, ESB) and approach the LDA as a delivery or management partner.
Owners on the register pay 7% of market value a year, and Budget 2026 announced a Revenue-collected Derelict Property Tax to replace the levy (legislation in 2026, register of land in 2027). Rising holding costs make the 124 privately owned sites candidates for a purchase offer.
113 schemes in the city have permission for 13,108 homes but no activity on site. Owners who cannot finance building may sell or forward-sell a block to an approved housing body using cost-rental finance.
Approved housing bodies can borrow up to 30% of the cost of new or acquired cost-rental homes on favourable terms, with the rest from the Housing Finance Agency; rents must be at least 25% below market.
Vacant Property Refurbishment Grant and Vacant Above the Shop Grant
Up to €50,000 to refurbish a home vacant for two years (€70,000 if derelict), up to €135,000 per building to turn empty space over shops into homes, and up to €40,000 extra for converting former commercial or public buildings into three or more homes.
Dublin City Council — partnership development call
Since June 2026 the council invites landowners and developers to propose mixed-tenure schemes of at least 100 social homes, ideally with cost rental. A cooperative can join a consortium for the cost-rental or community part.
13 sources connected, 1 waiting for access. We only use data we may lawfully reuse; where a publisher blocks automated access we do not work around it — a person downloads it, or we ask for permission.
Show every source, its licence and when we last read it
Shown while we ask Leerstandsmelder for permission. Reports since 2016 only, with the address, the month reported and a link to each entry; not checked by EHC. From a one-time copy of 4 October 2026 — the API is not fetched, as it disallows automated agents.
Asking for permission
0
Pending
2026-10-06
Credited to Leerstandsmelder.de; asking for permission
Department of Housing — 4Dublin Housing Supply Pipeline (Dublin City Council area)
Open API
136
Live
2026-10-06
No licence stated — shown with credit to the Department of Housing (EHC decision, 6 Oct 2026)
What this radar cannot see yet
No open aerial imagery: Tailte Éireann orthophotos are licensed products and no open WMS covers the city, so building cards carry no aerial close-up.
Office vacancy is published only as headline rates by brokers; GeoDirectory's address-level vacancy data is a paid product.
There is no address-level list of vacant homes: the Census gives counts by small area and the council's vacant-homes work is not published by address.
The Vacant Sites Register ended when the Residential Zoned Land Tax replaced the vacant site levy; the tax map shows land, not empty buildings.
Conversions that count as exempted development (such as vacant above-shop space) need no permission and do not appear in the planning data.
The data.gov.ie and Smart Dublin APIs are closed to automated access by robots.txt; only the dataset pages and the ArcGIS services behind them are used.
Know an empty building we have missed?
Open data cannot see everything. Tell us about a building in Dublin that stands empty or barely used; once we have checked it, it joins the map under “Reported by visitors (checked)”.
