When the Labour Party, back before the 2013 general election, told us that it had a plan, and that its plan was “costed and concrete”, it omitted to mention that it was a plan to rob the country wholesale, present it as progress, give as many people as possible little bits of the pie (or much bigger ones, depending on who they are) so that they wouldn’t complain and would vote for them, but then neglect to work out how all these pieces of planned daylight robbery would dovetail together and the overall effect even in the short term, let alone the medium to long term.

The situation today in the real estate market is absolutely disastrous. Those who are selling real estate or renting houses and flats are having a wild time, raking it in, as are their agents and all those providing professional services on the deals.

But those who need to buy a house have got it in the neck, though nowhere near as badly as those who need to rent a cheap flat.

The pressure on supply of cheap to medium-priced rentals had been escalating tremendously already because of the thousands of young single people pouring in to Malta to work in remote gaming, financial services or just to work, in anything.

Those young people started out by ‘colonising’ the place where they wanted to be at the outset – Sliema, Swieqi and St Julian’s – but before long they were pushed out by rocketing rents, at first to the outlying neighbourhoods of Gzira and Msida, then San Gwann, Naxxar and Mosta, and now they’ve been pushed out all the way to Birzebbuga, Marsascala and Haz-Zabbar (and those are just a few places).

Then the inevitable happens. Because they live so far away from their office, and because they’re young and want to go out for drinks every evening after work, they have to buy a car when before, living in the Sliema area, they didn’t need one. So now we have another intensifying problem: more cars on the roads. It’s cheaper to run a small second-hand car and live out of the main entertainment area than it is to pay the rent where they really would rather live.

But over the past four years, the problem has got so much worse because of the applicants to buy Maltese citizenship and permanent resident visas, who are not even required to live in Malta though they are required to have a registered address.

They don’t care about getting value for money, because they’re never going to set foot in the flat. If they need to come to Malta at all, they stay at a hotel.

So letting agents and landlords are cheating them blind, on the grounds that if they can afford it and don’t care, and if the landlords can get away with it, why not.

And now we have a desperate situation in which landlords are receiving phenomenal monthly payments for shabby flats in side-streets, converted basements and glorified garages, while the people who actually needed and still need to rent those places, because in an undistorted market they would be cheap, are unable to find anywhere to rent.

The pressure of demand for cheap flats has now encouraged building developers to argue for more and more building permits, and for planning permission to build over arable land and tear down old houses to replace them with tiny flats.

An enthusiastic Malta Developers Association has now commissioned a study from KPMG, which study is being promoted by the association’s president, Sandro Chetcuti, ahead of publication, which is clearly intended to back their demand for more building permits.

It is a “benchmark for policy makers and entrepreneurs,” Mr Chetcuti said yesterday, adding that the “prevailing trend presents a golden opportunity for real estate agents”.

He also spoke about what he called “unrealistic expectations by prospective tenants” – because it seems that now, renting a place you can actually afford to pay for is an “unrealistic expectation”.

In London, Rome and Paris, people move to the outer boroughs and districts for cheaper rent. In Malta, they can’t move into the sea.