Why Property Price Register figures can look odd

Spend twenty minutes on the register and you will find something that cannot be right. A four bedroom house in a good estate filed at a fraction of what its neighbours made. A brand new apartment recorded below what the developer was advertising. An address that names a street with no houses on it. Almost every one of these has an ordinary explanation, and knowing the list saves you from either dismissing the file as useless or quoting a nonsense figure with confidence.

The new build discount that is not a discount

Start with the biggest one, because it accounts for a large share of the rows that look wrong in new developments. Value added tax at 13.5 per cent applies to new residential property in Ireland. Stamp duty is calculated on the price before VAT, and the register is built from stamp duty filings, so a new dwelling is recorded at its VAT exclusive price. The buyer paid more than the register says, and the difference is the tax.

This is why a new estate can appear to be selling below the older houses beside it while the sales office is quoting higher figures. Nothing is being hidden and nobody got a bargain. One column is measured before tax and the other is not. Compare the two without adjusting and every conclusion you draw about that development will be wrong in the same direction.

Addresses are typed, not standardised

The address on a row is free text entered by the solicitor filing the return. Nobody validates it against a postal database, nobody applies a house style, and nobody goes back to fix it. In a single estate you can find the same road written four ways, house numbers dropped entirely, apartment numbers pushed into the street line, county names duplicated and townlands spelled as they sounded on the day.

• A row that looks like a duplicate is often two different units in the same block, distinguished only by an apartment number that was never typed.
• A missing house number makes a row unmatchable to a specific property, which is why some sales seem absent when they are in fact present and anonymous.
• An estate name spelled two ways splits one development into two search results, so a search that looks thin may be half a sample.
• Eircodes, where present, are the reliable identifier. On older rows there are none at all, which is covered in why the register has no Eircodes for older sales.

Prices that look far too low

The not full market price flag is doing the most work in that table. It marks transfers that were not sales between strangers at arm's length, and the register is right to include them because they are genuine filings. They are simply useless as evidence of value. Exclude them before you calculate a median for a road, or one family arrangement will drag the whole street down and you will never notice.

Prices that look far too high

The other direction is rarer and usually simpler. A single filing can cover more than the house you are thinking of: a home sold with adjoining land, with a second site, with a paddock or with an outbuilding that was separately valuable. A period property may have been bought with contents included in the consideration. And in a strong local market a genuine bidding contest can carry a price past everything nearby without any explanation beyond two buyers who both refused to lose.

Before deciding an outlier is an error, check whether the address describes a house or a holding. A row that reads as a house name with a townland and no number is frequently a property with land attached, and the price is honest even though it will never fit alongside the semi detached houses in the village.

The date is later than the deal

The date on the row is the date the transfer was executed, which is closing day. The price was agreed before that: typically some weeks or a couple of months earlier in a second hand sale once contracts and mortgage drawdown are worked through, and potentially much earlier on a new build bought off plan, where a contract signed at one stage of a scheme can close a year or more later at the price agreed back then.

That lag makes a row look mispriced whenever the market has moved. A closing recorded last month may reflect a bargain struck the previous spring, so it will read low in a rising market and high in a falling one, entirely without anyone doing anything unusual. The publication delay stacks on top of it, as traced in the filing and publication timeline.

What to do with a row you cannot explain

1. Check the not full market price flag. If it is set, stop: the row is not evidence of value.
2. Check whether the dwelling is new. If it is, gross the figure up for VAT before comparing it with anything second hand.
3. Read the address slowly and ask whether it describes a house, an apartment, a house with land, or something the file has garbled.
4. Look at the date and ask what the market was doing when the price was actually agreed rather than when it closed.
5. Look for the same address filed twice, once as a correction, and prefer the later row.
6. If none of that works, set the row aside. One unexplained figure should never outweigh five explicable ones. Compare it against the area pattern on our Irish sold price pages before giving it any weight.

The register rewards suspicion of the individual row and trust in the group. Any single filing can be odd for a reason invisible to you. Twenty filings in one estate over two years cannot all be odd in the same direction, and the shape they make together is what you should be reading. The method for turning that shape into a number is in valuing a home from register comparables.

Sources: data from the Residential Property Price Register, published by the PSRA and derived from stamp duty returns made to Revenue, which sets out how VAT and stamp duty apply to new residential property. The PSRA publishes the data as filed and does not verify it.