Why the register has no floor areas or Eircodes for older sales

Two fields would transform the Irish price register overnight, and neither of them is there. There is no floor area on any row, and there is no Eircode on the older ones. The absences are not oversights or backlogs. They follow directly from what the register is and when it was built, and understanding why tells you exactly which workarounds are worth your time.

The register only knows what the tax needed

Every row began as a stamp duty return filed by a solicitor with Revenue after a sale closed. That return exists to calculate a tax on a consideration, so it captures the consideration, the parties, the property address and the facts that change the rate, such as whether the dwelling was new. The size of the house does not change the duty payable, so nobody was ever asked for it, so it cannot appear in a file assembled from those returns.

This is the single most useful thing to understand about the whole dataset, because it predicts every other gap. No bedroom count, no property type beyond new or second hand, no tenure, no condition, no BER rating, no site area. If a fact does not affect a stamp duty calculation, it is not in the register, and no amount of complaining to the PSRA will change that, because the authority publishes what it is given. The full field list is in the register explained.

Why older rows carry no Eircode

Eircodes were introduced in 2015. The register begins in 2010. Sales in the first years of the file therefore predate the existence of the code entirely, and there is nothing to backfill them with that would not amount to the PSRA guessing. On later rows an Eircode appears where the filing supplied one, which is not the same as always.

There is a second complication that surprises people. An Eircode is not a geographic code in the way a British postcode is. The first three characters, the routing key, describe an area. The last four are a unique identifier for an individual address and are deliberately non sequential, so two neighbouring houses do not have similar codes and you cannot infer proximity by comparing them. Turning an Eircode into a map coordinate requires the licensed address database, which is a paid product, so precise mapping of the register is not something anyone can do for free.

What the missing size actually costs you

A price on its own is close to meaningless for comparison. Two houses on the same road at the same figure can be a bargain and a mistake, separated by forty square metres and an extension nobody mentioned. Price per square metre is the only measure that lets you compare a terrace with a semi, an apartment with a duplex, or the same estate against itself across a decade of alterations.

• Without size, an outlier cannot be explained. You cannot tell whether the expensive row is an overpayment or simply a larger house.
• Without size, extensions are invisible. Half of a road may have added forty square metres and the file will never say so.
• Without size, apartment comparisons are guesswork, because floor areas in the same block vary far more than the exteriors suggest.
• Without size, any price per square metre figure you see for Ireland came from a matched external source, an estimate, or nowhere at all.

Where to find the floor area instead

The BER route is the one worth learning properly, because a rating is required before a home is advertised for sale, which means most of your comparables will have one. It gives you the floor area and, as a bonus, the energy rating, which is itself a price factor and increasingly a lending consideration. The method for putting all of that together is in valuing a home from register comparables.

The reasonable question is whether any of this will ever be fixed. Adding a floor area would mean changing what a stamp duty return collects, which is a decision for tax policy rather than for the authority that publishes the file, and there is no obvious revenue reason to make it. Matching the register to the energy rating data would produce the same result without new paperwork, but the two datasets are joined only by free text addresses, which is precisely the field the register does worst. So the honest expectation is that the gap stays, and that anyone who wants price per square metre does the joining themselves.

Working around a missing Eircode

1. Search on address text rather than on code: estate name, road name, townland, district number.
2. Try more than one spelling, because the filing solicitor typed what they typed and abbreviations are common.
3. Sort by date and read the surrounding rows, since a scheme or an estate usually appears as a cluster.
4. Use the county field only as a last filter, because in Dublin especially it covers far too much ground, as described in researching an area in Dublin.
5. Where you only need the shape of an area rather than a specific house, start from our Irish sold price pages, which have done the grouping already.

What not to trust

Be sceptical of any Irish price per square metre figure whose source is described only as the Property Price Register. It cannot have come from there alone. Either somebody matched the addresses to another dataset, which is legitimate and should be stated, or somebody estimated sizes from property type, which is a modelling assumption dressed up as data. Ask which, and treat the answer as part of the number.

The same caution applies to maps. A precise pin on a register sale usually means an address was geocoded, and geocoding free text addresses produces errors that nobody sees because a map looks authoritative. A pin in the wrong estate is worse than no pin at all.

Sources: the Residential Property Price Register is published weekly by the Property Services Regulatory Authority from stamp duty returns filed with Revenue, and contains no floor area field. The PSRA publishes the data as filed and does not verify it.