Buying at auction or by private treaty: how each appears in the data

Most Irish homes are sold by private treaty, where bids are made through an agent and nothing binds anybody until contracts are signed. A minority are sold at auction, where the bidding happens in public, in a room or online, and the winning bidder signs on the spot. The two routes feel completely different to take part in. They produce identical looking rows on the register, which is a problem if you are trying to use the data as evidence.

Two ways to sell, one row in the file

The register is built from stamp duty returns, and a return records a transfer of property for a consideration. It does not record how the parties reached that consideration. Whether a house was fought over by six bidders at an auction, agreed quietly with a neighbour, or sold on the third attempt after two chains collapsed, the file shows the same fields: date of sale, price, address, county, and the flags.

That is worth knowing before you assume anything about a row. An unusually low sale in a good area is often assumed to be an auction, and it may equally be a probate sale to a sitting tenant, a transfer between relatives that carries the not full market price flag, or a house in a condition you would not believe from the street.

Private treaty, and what it leaves behind

In a private treaty sale the asking price is published, bids are made informally to the agent, and the property goes sale agreed at a figure that is not published anywhere. Contracts follow, usually after a survey and a lender valuation, and either side can still walk away until they are signed. Weeks or months later the sale closes and the price reaches the register.

What that leaves behind in the data is a single number with a long history behind it and no trace of the history. The gap between the advertised price and the register row can go either way, for reasons set out in asking price versus sold price. What the row does give you is certainty about one thing: this is the amount the property actually achieved, after everything that happened.

Auction, and what it leaves behind

An auction runs to a published advised minimum value, which is a marketing figure, and a reserve set by the seller, which is not published. Bidding is public. If the reserve is met, contracts are signed on the day and a deposit is paid immediately, with closing following some weeks later. There is no cooling off period, no financing condition and no second chance to negotiate after a survey.

• Everything has to be done beforehand: the legal pack read, the survey carried out, the funding confirmed, the title questions answered.
• Properties reaching auction skew towards probate sales, receivership and repossession, unusual buildings, mixed use, and anything a lender will not readily finance.
• The hammer price is the contract price, so unlike a private treaty sale there is no later renegotiation to move it.
• The date on the register will be the closing date, weeks after the auction, so a sale you watched in March may appear dated in May.
• Online auction platforms have made the format far more common in Ireland than it once was, which means auction stock now appears across a wider range of price levels.

What the register does not record about method

The not full market price flag is regularly misread as a distress marker. It is not. It marks a transfer that was not an arm's length sale at market value, such as property passing between family members or a part share being bought out. A receiver selling a house on the open market is conducting a market sale and would not normally be flagged, even though the seller is under pressure. The other things people misread are collected in why register figures look odd.

Reading auction sales into your comparables

There is one useful trick available here. Auction houses publish their results, with the hammer price, at the time of the auction. That figure is the contract price, so when the sale eventually reaches the register months later the two should agree. It is a rare chance to check a public dataset against an independent record, and it also lets you know months in advance what a particular row will say.

When you fold auction sales into a comparable set, treat them carefully rather than excluding them. They are real market prices, but the properties that reach auction are not a random sample of the street: they are more often the probate case, the one with a title problem, the one that needs everything done. Note what the lot actually was before you let it move your estimate, using the method in valuing a home from register comparables.

Which route suits which buyer

1. If you need a mortgage approval that is still conditional, private treaty is the realistic route, because auction bidding assumes funds you can produce immediately.
2. If you are buying something unusual or in poor condition, auction is often the only place it appears, and the price may reflect the smaller pool of buyers who can act.
3. If you go to auction, spend the money on the survey and the legal review before the day. That expenditure is at risk and it is still the cheaper option.
4. Either way, set your ceiling from evidence before the emotion starts, using the register data for the area.
5. And remember that the ceiling includes stamp duty and costs, which are covered in stamp duty in Ireland.

The deeper point is that the register flattens both routes into the same shape, which is convenient for analysis and misleading if you forget it. A price is a price, however it was arrived at. Whether it was a good price depends on things the file will never tell you, and finding those out is still done by reading, walking and asking rather than by downloading.

Sources: transaction data from the Residential Property Price Register, published weekly by the PSRA from stamp duty returns. Auctioneers and estate agents conducting these sales are licensed by the Property Services Regulatory Authority, which publishes its register of licensees.