At long long last, Ireland has a property price register! The site went live hours before the revised deadline (end of Q3 2012), and there will hopefully be time in future to quibble about how it took so long for what seems to be no more than “export to .csv” – particularly given how much extra had been done by private citizens, by the time I went to bed less than 12 hours after its launch, from rival sites to apps.
Nonetheless, we should take the opportunity to bask in this wonderful new service available to individuals and households active in the property market. With all the excitement, I thought I might offer three tips for researchers, from someone who spends an unhealthy amount of time with property market data, as I see from thepropertypin and other places that plenty are starting to do their own number-crunching.
Individual analysis, not market analysis
The first tip would be to remind people that the primary contribution of the register is in relation to individual transactions, not market-level analysis. What I mean by this is that someone thinking of buying a property has an area, village or street in mind, and with this tool, they can go on and – using their knowledge of particular properties, including things like size, condition, aspect, etc. – see what prices are like nearby.
The volume of sales
Nonetheless, people will be determined to divine some signals about the market as a whole from the register as currently constituted. So, when it comes to market-level analysis, the only really cast-iron contribution of the register is sales volumes. The register tells you how many properties were sold by month for each county. It is clear that there will be variability in individual county-month pairings, so my own recommendation would be to focus on quarterly data at the provincial level (counting Dublin as its own province).
What about prices?
Ultimately, though, people want to talk about prices, which I get. If you must talk about prices, best to talk about median prices (=MEDIAN in Excel), or perhaps the other quartiles such as 25th and 75th percentiles (one quarter and three quarters the way through the price distribution).
What I am stressing, though, is to avoid talking about mean prices (=AVERAGE in Excel). Even with median prices, the data are going to get dragged this way and that by the mix of locations and types of properties sold in any given quarter, which is why even median prices have greater health warnings than – believe it or not – hedonic or mix-adjusted prices such as the CSO and daft.ie series.
Mean prices (what we think of when we typically think of averages) will be affected not only by that but also by extreme values and in particular errors in data entry by solicitors, which are not infrequent (having spent a lot of time yesterday wrestling with the data). For example, one property in Limerick sold for €127m [I’m guessing €127,000 is its true price] while others in “leafy” parts of Dublin sold for mere thousands [not hundreds of thousands].
So, use with caution as a market research tool. This is not a substitute for a rigorous index of house prices and, like it or lump it, indices such as the CSO and Daft.ie remain far better tools to analyse price trends in the market as a whole. But that should not take away from the main point, i.e. that this is an absolutely essential tool for those looking to buy and sell. Happy nosy-parkering!
eamonn moran ,
Hi Ronan
I have a (completely personal)theory that the availability of this new property index will have a significant impact on a certain type of home sale.
I think it will result in an increase in prices of homes sold after someone is deceased. I believe that in the past many of these homes were sold below the value they were worth for a few reasons.
1. Solicitor would be in charge of sale rather than a financially interested party.
2. Siblings of deceased may have less of a knowledge in resale value and are just happy to be receiving a lump sum
3. There is usually a greater emphasis in getting a property sold quickly than getting a fair price.
4. Homes of older people may have outdated furniture and fixtures and lack the whole smoke and mirrors attractiveness of a home being sold by someone financially interested in selling the house.
I think the new property price register will give siblings or other beneficiaries a greater understanding of value and will reduce the superficial premium given to well presented homes as the buyer will be able to be more accurate in the upgrade cost compared to other similar properties whose value is now known.
Just thought I would put it to you to see what your opinion on my theory would be.
I think it could result in a short term boost to prices.
I also think the new property tax should result in buyers reducing the cost they are willing to pay by (1/4% x 25) 6% but probably wont unless banks use it as part of their calculations. I have no Idea if they plan to.
Also the price rises at the moment and certainly any increase in volume is most likely very related to the mortgage interest cliff at the end of the year.
Barry ,
I sold my property recently, I think it is great to have the data available, however I sold the property for 172k not 162k as listed, neighbour who is selling his property also now thinks I bullshitted him when I had told him the sale price. I looked on the website and see no way of correcting errors, any suggestions?
Ronan Lyons ,
Hi Barry,
Thanks for that note – unless there is a VAT or furnishings issue, then the best thing to do is ring your solicitor and ask him for a record of the eStamp (which, to the best of my knowledge) is the form he would have filled in to pay stamp duty, and if you’ve any queries about that his explanation of why it is the way it is. That should settle things – an error is possible but I would have thought unlikely as you would have noticed it on your stamp duty bill.
R
Laura ,
Something I found useful was to note asking prices of houses I’d had my eye on some months ago, and then look up. The results were stunning – only one of them went for anywhere near the asking price and that was 10k under it. Some of the prices for the development I live in were particularly surprising – much lower than I thought (considerably less than the original prices back in the late 1990s, which is very surprising).