Asking price vs sold price in the Irish market

Three numbers describe an Irish house sale and only one of them is ever published. There is the price it was quoted at, which anybody walking past can read. There is the figure it went sale agreed at, which almost nobody outside the transaction ever learns. And there is the amount on the register, which surfaces months later and is the only one carrying any evidential weight. Most arguments about the Irish market consist of people comparing the first with the third and announcing conclusions about the second.

Three numbers, one of them public

The quoted price is a piece of marketing. It has to interest enough buyers to fill a Saturday viewing while not insulting the owner, and in a busy area agents will pitch it deliberately short of what they expect, on the reasoning that a crowd sets the price better than a number does. In auction language the same instinct produces the advised minimum value. Neither figure is a forecast, and either can be revised at any point without a public record of the change.

The sale agreed figure is the one everybody actually wants and nobody outside gets. It is the point at which bidding stopped, and it is not published by the agent, the seller or the State. It is also provisional, because in Ireland nothing is binding until contracts are signed, so the amount that stops the bidding is not necessarily the amount that closes the sale.

The register figure is the consideration declared to Revenue for stamp duty on the day the deed was executed. It has already been through the survey, the lender valuation, the drafting of contracts and any late argument about what turned up in the title. It reaches the weekly publication after the filing, which follows closing, which followed the bidding by some distance. By the time it is in front of you, the deal behind it can be most of a year old.

Irish bidding runs in both directions

Private treaty is how the large majority of Irish homes change hands. Bids go to the agent informally, by phone or increasingly through an online bidding platform, and there is no sealed envelope and no deadline unless the agent invents one. In a competitive area the accepted bid regularly finishes above the quoted price. In a slow one the property is often quietly re-quoted rather than formally reduced, which removes the evidence that anything was conceded at all.

The absence of a binding agreement until contracts cuts both ways and leaves no trace in the data either way. A seller can accept a later higher bid after going sale agreed. A buyer can come back with a lower number after a survey. Both happen, neither is recorded anywhere, and the register shows only whatever survived the process.

• A survey finding. Damp, a failed septic tank, mica or pyrite concerns, or movement in a wall will reopen a price that everybody thought was settled.
• The lender valuation. Where the valuer appointed by the bank comes in under the agreed figure, either the buyer produces the shortfall in cash or the number comes down.
• Title work. A missing certificate of planning compliance, a right of way, an unregistered extension or a boundary that does not match the map can all cost the seller money at the end.
• Time. A sale that drags through a slow chain or a probate delay gives a buyer both an excuse and an appetite to revisit the figure.
• Contents. Where furniture, appliances or garden equipment are bought under a separate and genuine agreement, that money never reaches the filed consideration.

The contents point has a consequence worth remembering when you read a row. Only the consideration for the property itself is filed, so two closings that looked identical on the day can publish different figures because one included the kitchen appliances in the price and the other did not.

You are comparing two different calendars

A quoted price on a portal this morning describes what a seller hopes for this week. A register row describes a bid that was accepted, in many cases, before Christmas. Put them side by side and the difference you calculate is substantially a measure of how much time passed, which is a fact about conveyancing rather than about negotiation. In a rising market this makes sellers look reasonable and in a falling one it makes them look greedy, and neither impression is earned.

The disciplined version is to match the periods. Take register rows whose date of sale falls inside a chosen window, find the prices those same homes were quoted at, and compare within the window rather than against today. Where the sample is too small for that, move the older figures forward with the official index and label them as adjusted so that nobody mistakes an estimate for a sale. That method is set out in reading Irish price trends.

The new build trap

There is one Irish comparison that goes wrong every single time, and it has nothing to do with negotiation. A new home is advertised at a price including value added tax at 13.5 per cent. The register records the price before that tax, because stamp duty on a new dwelling is charged on the pre VAT figure. Put the brochure price beside the register row and a gap appears out of thin air.

Measuring the gap on your own road

1. Pull a year and a half of closings for the road or the estate from the register data, which is a long enough window to give you a sample and short enough to still describe the same market.
2. Recover what each of those homes was quoted at. Saved portal pages, agent result listings and printed brochures are the usual places it survives.
3. Throw out the rows that are not like the others: a different kind of dwelling, a property sold with land, anything carrying the not full market price flag.
4. Put new builds in their own column, or gross them up for VAT first, because otherwise the tax will masquerade as a discount.
5. Convert each pair into a percentage rather than a euro figure, so that a small terrace and a large detached house can be read on the same scale.
6. Look at the middle of those percentages and at how widely they scatter. A tight scatter means the middle is telling you something; a wide one means it is not.

A table like that is read for its pattern, not its average. Houses landing at or above the quoted price while apartments land below it is a real result, and it probably says more about how the two are being pitched by agents than about the buildings themselves. Deciding that the whole road concedes four per cent because one apartment did is not a result, and an agent will dismantle it in a sentence.

Taking it into a bid

What the exercise gives you is a realistic expectation, not an opening number. If everything comparable nearby has been closing at or above the quoted price, an opening bid well under it simply removes you from the conversation. If the pattern runs the other way, you are holding evidence, and evidence is what allows you to stay where you are when you are told there is another party interested.

Put the rows on the table rather than an opinion. Name the four nearest closings, note what they achieved, and ask what makes this house worth more than that pattern. If there is a good answer, you have learned something worth paying for. If there is not, you have learned something too. The comparable method underneath the argument is in valuing a home from register comparables.

Sources: closing prices come from the Residential Property Price Register, published weekly by the PSRA from stamp duty returns and covering sales since 2010. For the direction of the market rather than individual sales, the Central Statistics Office publishes the official residential property price index at cso.ie.