Irish Property statistics

The Irish Property Bubble (2006) The Republic of Property
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There does not appear to be anywhere that you can find decent stats on the number of properties for rent or sale in the Dublin area and how that compares from month to month.

I’ve been keeping an eye on daft for the past few months to see the number of properties for rent. In January it was roughly 3000. In late June, it passed the 4000 mark and today it has reached 4586.

Similarly, had a look at all the areas on myhome.ie and last Friday the figure was 3165 properties for sale although this does include some new developments with only one house in them which are counted only once. Be good to watch these figures as the onset of the property crash in the US has been signalled by a massive rise in inventory

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I have been watching properties for sale in Kildare on Daft for three years. The have ranged between 140 - 200 until April this year. Then they went to 300, then 400. Yesterday they were 590.
HCM

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Bless your perseverance HMC, with no listings system in Ireland its (almost) impossible to track inventory. I’ll start tracking inventory in Meath on Daft and MyHome.

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Thank you kindly Duplex

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gearoidmm

you’ve highlighted one of the biggest issues with analysing the Irish proeprty market, no central recording of the “inventory”

While the CSO can provide some very useful stats there is no “current picture” available and I suspect that suits the ‘vested interests’.

If you as a prospective “buy to let” purchaser don’t know just how flooded the market is you’re more likely to buy, similarly for a wouldbe tennant.

On the fact of it, across the contry, we’re building more than we need, which I suspect is why we’re starting to see some ‘pull back’ in the number of planning applications from developers.

Blue Horseshoe

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I think I’ll make this a weekly thing on Mondays. Daft listing for dublin is now 4733 rental properties available. I no longer believe that this could entirely be a seasonal thing - it’s up 200 in the last week alone

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Properties for sale in Kildare today on Daft.ie, 661

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For all this talk of possible rising inventory, we still have nothing on the scale of the americans. Current population of San Diego 1.22 million (roughly equivalent to greater Dublin) - inventory 22,049 houses for sale. Compare this to roughly 5000 units for sale in Dublin, Kildare, Wicklow and Meath combined.

We haven’t quite seen the peak of this yet

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myhome.ie at 3208 in Dublin
Daft 4944 rentals

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You need to be very careful when comparing residential property for sale ‘inventories’ in the US and Ireland.

In Ireland the vendor will normally enter into a contract with a single estate agent, that precludes them advertising or selling the property via any other channel. That agent then works on behalf of the vendor to extract the maximum price (by fair means or foul) for the property. There is no central ‘pool’ of properties that the agent can offer. Irish agents only offer properties for sale that have been exclusively brought to them for sale and for which they have a contract.

The US model, as I understand it, is different (and not having had first hand experience of it I will stand to be corrected on this). My understanding is that ‘over there’ an agent can sell any property on the market. So there is a ‘central pool’ of properties for sale and hence a fairly accurate count of the ‘inventory’ can be gathered.

Here, the only way to collate such a number would be to physically visit each individual estate agent and manually go through their ‘book’. Not all estate agents use the web, not all those who use the web, advertise all their properties on line and particularly for ‘new builds’ only one advertisement will appear on line for each ‘model’ of property in the development.

So counting the number of properties advertised online will merely highlight a fraction of the total number available (and we can’t even begin to estimate that fraction). Remember that it’s in estate agents interest to present the appearance of a shortage or lack of supply of available properties, even if the reality is something completely different.

Blue Horseshoe

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I almost knew all f what you said regards the US, but the complete centralisation of a pool of “sale” properties is interesting, I thought they didn’t like that kind of thing over there, you know something resmebeling communisim/centralised control? :wink:

So essentially our system is that of smoke & mirrors… SURPRISE SURPRISE!

Well joking aside, I think it is a good idea.

Take DAFT, daft is grerat at showcasing of the digital potential of centralisisng all accomodation information to facilitate the myriad of tranasctions but its got a lot of FAT in its presentation.

For example there are a lot of the descriptions that are windy in their breath, a waste of pixel space. There is a lot of “plumping” going on .

Now how about this, if we go to the golden pages, we find the following,

Auctioneers, Estate Agents & Valuers (3896)

Letting Agents - Apartments, Flats & Houses (14)

Property Management (9)

Overseas Property Sales & Letting (3)

I would imagine the reason the other categories are so low “letting Agents” only 14?? Is becasue the Auctioneers, Estate Agents & Valuers also perform most of the same business so you find the majority of the listings there.

So lets take the number at approx 3800 Estate Agents, general selling agents. (I am presumming some agents sell other things like antiques and such like).

Lets imagine each agent has the follwoing on there books,

Agents x Properties = Avg National Inventory

3800 x 10 properties = 38,000
3800 x 30 properties = 114000
3800 x 50 properties = 190000
3800 x 100 properties = 380000

I believe it reasonable to estimate antyhing from 20 to 40 odd properties per agent, which give us a large figure.

I am guessing there could be anything up tp 152,000 properties on the market, thats an average of 40 properties per agent.

What else can we do but ring each one up and ask them?

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Actually OW,

there was an interesting piece of information relased by BoI this month;

10,000 new companies were set up in the first half of this year

1,288 were in the construction and civil engineering sector.

654 were in Real estate

637 property management

rte.ie/business/2006/0711/boi.html

So, out of 10,000 new companies formations in the State for the first 6 months of 2006, 2,579 or 25% are direclty dependent on construction/property.

Thats balanced … :unamused:

I think OW you should start ringing and post the results on the site … a representitive call of 38 (1 in every 100) should be enough to get a valid result. Doing it once a quarterly and relasing the “Quarterly Property Pin Inventory” to the media might be interesting … assuming the agents give real results, but again a spot check of 8-10 or the 38 (25%) on a simple “how many they have in the window” cross reference should suffice.

Blue Horseshoe

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Hell yeah.

Nothing like a bit of market research, if we get a listing and I get some free time at work I’ll help out…

I’m calling on behalf of “thepropertypin”… :laughing:

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There would of course need to be some very clear guide lines;

First off, deciding whether it’s a Dublin only, Dublin plus commuter belt or country wide survey. That will define the mix of agent locations to call.

Secondly determining how many of the 3800 listed agents are branches of the larger players. The branches may be able to “cross sell” properties placed with other branches in the company. You’d need to talk to someone with experience of the industry to clarify that (no point in double counting ‘units’)

Then running a random ‘double checks’ on the reported numbers, might just be as simple as count of properties in the window … but necessary.

Blue Horseshoe

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Daft 5111 rentals
myhome.ie 3139 in Dublin

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But isn’t it all predicated on income and consequent demand???

Obviously the bubble will continue to expand if those variables remain stable and to all intensive purposes it’s looking like they will for at least the next year and then the pain is coming in 2008, according to the ESRI.

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myhome.ie 3316 in Dublin now (up from 3139 a month ago)

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Daft inventory for Meath

7 July 487

19 July 504

28 Aug 665

I suppose with the ‘selling season’ starting new instructions will arrive on the market over the next few weeks. It will be interesting to note however, whether Daft inventory drops or continues to build. :confused:

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House + Apartments Co. Meath, on www.daft.ie now inventory now stanging at,

962 - 06.09.06