About us
We have been tracking asking prices in the Republic since August 2007 and in Northern Ireland since November 2007. We believe that tracking the trend in the number and size of changes in asking prices is a good gauge of the health of the property market.
Our methods are crude and certainly do not provide a substitute to the 'official' house price indices such as those from PermanentTSB/ERSI or Halifax. Our measure of the change in asking prices, which you can find in our charts titled 'Annualised Weekly % Change in Asking Prices on....', is quite a different measure than that of the price indices mentioned above. You can find an explanation of our method below.
We produce reports on the changes in asking prices each week for Daft.ie, Propertynews.com, DNG.ie, Propertypal.com, Remax.ie, Huntforproperty.ie, Sellityourself.ie, Privateseller.ie, and Youbuyfromme.ie. We think it's important to differentiate price changes between North and South. Daft.ie and Propertynews.com each have listings for both North and South. We consider Daft.ie the best dataset for the South. It has a limited number of Northern lisitngs which we analyse in a seperate report. We view Propertynews.com as a better source for the property listings in the North. It also has a reasonable number of listings for the South (approximatley half of the amount on Daft.ie) so we also include analysis of these listings. Propertypal.com is focused on the North, is growing very quickly, and we expect it will shortly begin to rival Propertynews as the dominant listings website in the North.
We provide charts of the trends on Daft.ie and Propertynews.com. The Daft.ie charts appear on our homepage and the Propertynews.com charts are available for the North and Republic.
Below we provide some explanation of our charts.
Number of Drops Detected
Each week we record the number of price drops and show that number split into ranges of price change. The total number of drops is probably our key indicator for the health of the market as it gives an indication of how many sellers are revising their expectations of the acheivable price for their property. The ranges presented in the chart can also be used to get an idea of how large the price drops are and if sellers are making larger or smaller changes to the asking prices compared to previous periods.
Annualised Weekly Change
For the Annualised Weekly Change we take the total value of all price changes for the week, both
positive and negative, and divide that number into the total value of listings. We then annualise that figure.
eg. for Daft.ie for
the week ending 23rd Feb '08 the sum of the changes in asking prices was -€14.09m and the total value of listings was €19.93Bn.
So, the percentage decline was -0.07%. This number is then annualised by compounding it over 52 weeks, i.e.
1-(1+(-0.07))^52 = -3.6%.
Total Number of Listings
The total number of listings is fairly self-explanatory but one thing to keep in mind is that sellers often engage two or more estate agents which means their property can appear multiple times. Also, approximately 10% of listings do not contain an asking price. These are included in the total number of listings data but not in our other analysis.
Age of Listings
For the current properties listed, we show how many have been listed since we first started tracking asking prices, August 2007 for Daft.ie and November 2007 for Propertynews.com. As you can see, a large proportion of the current listings have been on the market since those dates. The chart also shows how many properties, that are still listed, came to the market in the months since our records began.
We hope to expand this page over time and would appreciate any suggestions for content. Contact us
here.