The Property Price Register explained: what it does and does not contain

The Residential Property Price Register is the most useful open dataset in Irish property and the most frequently misdescribed. It lists residential sales in the State from 1 January 2010 onward, it is refreshed every week, and it now holds roughly three quarters of a million rows. It is free to search, granular down to an individual front door, and missing several things people are certain are in it.

A tax by-product, not a property database

Section 86 of the Property Services (Regulation) Act 2011 obliged the Property Services Regulatory Authority to establish and maintain a register of residential property sale prices. The authority does not gather that information itself. It receives it from the Revenue Commissioners, who receive it from the stamp duty return the buyer's solicitor files after a sale closes. Every row you read began life as a tax filing.

That origin explains almost every quirk in the file. The register contains what Revenue needs in order to charge stamp duty correctly and nothing else, because nothing else was ever collected. It contains no verification, because the PSRA publishes the filings as made and states plainly that it does not vouch for their accuracy. And it contains the whole country, because stamp duty is a national tax and there is no county that escapes it.

What the register contains

What it does not contain

• Floor area. There is no size figure of any kind, so price per square metre cannot be calculated from the register alone.
• Bedrooms, bathrooms, condition, garden, parking, orientation or any other physical description of the building.
• Property type beyond new or second hand. A one bedroom apartment and a detached house on an acre look identical in the file.
• Tenure. Nothing distinguishes a freehold house from an apartment held on a long lease, and no lease length is recorded.
• Names. Neither the buyer nor the seller appears, and neither does the estate agent or the solicitor.
• The asking price, the number of bidders, whether it went to auction, or how long it had been on the market.
• Rents. Letting data is a separate matter for the Residential Tenancies Board and never appears here.
• Non-residential property. Sites, farmland, retail units and commercial buildings are outside the register.

The omissions are not oversights. A stamp duty return exists to calculate a tax on a consideration, so it captures the consideration and the facts that change the rate. How many bedrooms the house has does not change the rate, so nobody was ever asked. Understanding that logic tells you in advance which questions the register can answer and which ones require another source entirely.

The flags that change a row

Two markers do the heavy lifting. The not full market price flag identifies transfers that were not arm's length sales: property passing between family members, sales carrying a right of residence, a part share bought out, a transfer under a court order. Those rows are legitimate filings and terrible comparables. Any median that includes them is dragged downward by transactions that were never priced by a market.

The new dwelling marker is subtler and costlier. VAT at 13.5 per cent applies to new residential property in Ireland, and stamp duty is charged on the price before that tax, so the register carries the VAT exclusive figure. A new build row therefore sits well below the amount the purchaser handed over, and mixing new and second hand rows in one average produces a number that describes neither. The arithmetic, including the part that most people get backwards, is worked through in new build or second hand.

How it differs from the register across the water

Irish buyers who have looked at British sold prices arrive with the wrong expectations, and buyers moving the other way do the same. The two files answer similar questions from opposite directions. HM Land Registry Price Paid Data is a registration by-product covering England and Wales only, published monthly, running back to 1995, and carrying property type and tenure on every row. The Irish register is a tax by-product covering the entire State, published weekly, running back to 2010, and carrying neither type nor tenure.

The practical upshot is that the Irish file is better for coverage and freshness and worse for classification. You can see every county here, updated every week, but you cannot filter to detached houses, and you have to handle the VAT rule that has no British equivalent. Neither file has floor area, which is the one thing both would benefit from most.

Using it well

1. Filter to a small area first, by estate or street text rather than by county, so you are reading a comparable population.
2. Drop every row flagged as not full market price before you calculate anything.
3. Separate new dwellings from second hand ones, and if you must combine them, gross the new rows up for VAT first.
4. Treat the last few weeks as incomplete, because filings continue to arrive after publication.
5. Bring size in from outside the register, from the building energy rating certificate or the original listing, before comparing two prices.
6. Use our Irish sold price pages when you want the pattern for an area rather than a row for a house.

Do that and the register becomes what it should be: hard evidence about what buyers have actually paid nearby, which is the only foundation a bid or an asking price can honestly rest on. Skip those steps and it becomes a machine for producing confident wrong numbers, which is roughly how it appears in half the conversations you will hear about it.

Sources and attribution: data from the Residential Property Price Register, published by the Property Services Regulatory Authority under the Property Services (Regulation) Act 2011 from stamp duty returns filed with Revenue. For the official measure of price change rather than individual sales, see the Central Statistics Office at cso.ie. Related reading: how to check what a house sold for.