How to check what a house sold for in Ireland

Every residential property sold in Ireland since the start of 2010 sits in a public file. When a sale closes, the buyer's solicitor files a stamp duty return with the Revenue Commissioners, and the price, the address, the county and the date of sale are lifted from that return and published. The file is the Residential Property Price Register, it is maintained by the Property Services Regulatory Authority, and looking anything up in it costs nothing.

What most people want from it is one number: what the house across the road actually made, so the figure being quoted for the one beside it can be measured against something real. The register answers that question well. It answers several neighbouring questions badly, and telling those two groups apart is most of the skill of using it.

Where the number comes from

The price on the register is not a valuation, an estimate or an agent's opinion. It is the consideration declared to Revenue when stamp duty was paid on the transfer, published under section 86 of the Property Services (Regulation) Act 2011. Nobody at the PSRA inspects the property, re-does the arithmetic or corrects the spelling. The authority publishes what was filed, which is a strength when you want an unvarnished record and a weakness when the filing was careless.

Two consequences follow immediately. Because the source is a tax return rather than a registration of title, the register covers the whole State, all twenty six counties, not a region of it. And because stamp duty on a new home is charged on the price before value added tax, a new build row is filed exclusive of the 13.5 per cent VAT the buyer actually paid on top. That one rule causes more confusion than everything else in the file put together, and it has its own explanation.

The register is also not a land registry. Ownership of Irish property is registered with Tailte Eireann, which holds title, folios and maps and charges its own fees for them. The PPR holds prices and says nothing about who owns what.

Where to actually search it

1. The source itself, at propertypriceregister.ie. Choose a county, narrow by date, price band or a fragment of an address, and the matching filings come back on screen. Nothing about it is designed to be pleasant, and for a single address that hardly matters.
2. The export from that same search, which drops your filtered rows into a spreadsheet. Anyone comparing a whole estate or a whole year will end up here, because sorting and filtering at home beats paging through results.
3. A grouped view such as our Irish sold price pages, where the filings are already collected by area with counts and medians attached, with Dublin broken out separately.

None of those can contradict another about a price, since all of them are reading the same filings. Where they will differ is at the edges: how a mangled address is interpreted, and how much of the last fortnight has been picked up, because every service refreshes on its own timetable after the weekly update lands.

The seven things a row will tell you

The two flags that change what a row means

Two small columns carry far more weight than their size suggests. Not full market price marks a transfer that was never an ordinary sale between strangers: property passing between relatives, a sale with a right of residence attached, a part share being bought out, a transfer ordered in a family law settlement. Leave those rows out of any average you calculate. The VAT marker does the opposite job. It warns you that the figure in front of you is smaller than the cheque the buyer wrote, by the tax that went to Revenue on a new dwelling.

The table is worth reading twice, once for what is in it and once for what is not. Size is not in it. Neither is the number of rooms, the state of the building, the size of the site, a photograph, or the fact that the place was rewired the year before it sold. Without a size figure you cannot put two prices on a common scale at all, which is why the missing floor area is the gap that quietly ruins most casual analysis.

When your search comes back empty

• It closed recently. Publication waits on the filing, the filing waits on the closing, and the freshest weeks are always thinner than they will end up being.
• It was not a sale at all. Property inherited or handed on within a family produces no market price, and where a filing exists it usually carries the not full market price flag.
• You searched a version of the address that nobody typed. Estates get abbreviated, house numbers vanish, townlands are spelled by ear and apartment numbers end up in the wrong part of the line.
• It is not residential. Sites, farmland, shops, offices and licensed premises never enter the register, even where somebody lives upstairs.
• It sold before 2010, which is where the file starts and where it will always start.

Nothing on that list involves anything being hidden. The Oireachtas required stamp duty data to be published and the PSRA publishes it, so the file inherits the shape of a tax return rather than the shape of a property database anyone would design. When a sale you know about is missing, assume the calendar first and read the filing and publication timeline.

One row proves very little

Any individual filing is a story you cannot see the rest of. Behind that figure there may have been a probate deadline, a separation, an executor told to close before the year end, a buyer who needed that particular school, or a seller who wanted the thing gone. The row shows the outcome and hides the cause, so an argument resting on one row is an argument about a household you have never met.

Half a dozen closings of comparable homes in the same development within a year behave much better. The private reasons cancel each other out, what is left in the middle is closer to a market price, and the odd ones out start to explain themselves once you look at what was actually sold. That is how a valuer works, and there is nothing in it that a careful person with a spreadsheet cannot do, as set out in valuing a home from register comparables.

Attribution and fair use

The register is public data published by the PSRA, and the correct thing to do when you reuse it is to say where it came from: data from the Residential Property Price Register, propertypriceregister.ie. The authority sets out its own terms on the site, and the PSRA itself, which also licenses auctioneers and letting agents, is at psr.ie.

A word about the households behind the addresses. The file names nobody, yet a figure sitting beside a door number on a given date is still information about the people who lived there. The register is there for weighing up a purchase, not for satisfying curiosity about what the people next door could afford, and anyone whose own entry is causing them a real difficulty should say so rather than assume that published is the end of the matter.

Sources: the Residential Property Price Register is the primary file, published weekly by the Property Services Regulatory Authority from stamp duty returns made to Revenue. For the direction of the market rather than individual sales, the official index is published by the Central Statistics Office at cso.ie.