Let's talk about Dublin Houses Daftwatch figures

The Irish Property Bubble Sell, Buy or Rent?
#1

https://www.graspchinese.com/images/misc/daftwatch.jpg

Findings from the above chart which I prepared

There are more houses for sale in both Galway and in Cork than in Dublin

Cork has 60% more houses for sale than Dublin

Dublin only has about 10% of the total houses for sale in Ireland

The amount of Dublin houses for sale is dropping

Summary

Although the amount of properties for sale in Ireland is growing steadily and suggests a significant overhang, this doesn’t appear to be the case regarding houses in Dublin. They make up a small fraction of overall properties, they are lower than 2 of the provincial cities, and actually dropping!

I’m not talking up the market but these figures do paint a certain picture. If we focus on the supply side, can anyone tell me why the Dublin housing market isn’t in a relatively robust position? Specifically, are there anomalies in the daftwatch data? For instance multi-unit developments like Stocking Wood would be listed once but there would be multiple houses available. But this would also be the case in the other counties, and I would imagine such multi-unit developments are more common outside of Dublin.

I know that there are a host of issues on the demand side, like unemployment, affordability, availability of credit. But the supply side of the Dublin hosting market doesn’t seem in too weak a position??

#2

Check out the explosion in the number of houses to rent in Dublin - tells you all need to know.

#3

I think the trend is that those who would have bought a house out in the sticks during the bubble years would now be buying in the city. Many of those who are out in the sticks will gradually want to move back into the city.

The cities will do better than the outer commuter zones in the bubble burst. City areas with a bad reputation won’t do well either.

#4

I think it’s fair to say that the oversupply problem will be much more pronounced outside Dublin. A lot of the stuff built out West is completely useless and will probably have to be torn down.

However, even if Dublin stock diminished at its current rate without anything new coming onto the market it would still take years to clear it. Nobody is saying we’ll never run out of houses again but considering you can put up an apartment block fairly easily within about 18 months we’re a very very long way away from a problem.

#5

I think one thing that needs to be looked at is Daft’s market share in the Dublin region.

MyHome has around 12,000 properties for sale in the Dublin area while Cork only has just over 4,000 for sale. This would suggest that it’s an issue with market share rather than anything else.

#6

I’ve just quickly prepared this breakdown using Daftwatch’s rental data

https://www.graspchinese.com/images/misc/daftwatchrentals.jpg

Dublin apartments are largely responsible for the majority of the rise in Dublin rentals

Dublin house rentals are up by just 282 or 11% since the start of the year, not a big explosion.

#7

Your dataset is too short. You need to take in from start of 2007.

#8

And apts did account for a large amount of new dwellings in the Dublin area during the bubble.

Alot of bubble properties are for sale. Just hover your mouse over new estates on the Daft/myhome map and compare to established estates and you will see the new estates have hell of alot for sale in both apts and houses than the established ones.

#9

Dublin will be dragged down by the over supply in other parts of the country

So relatively robust yes

but only relative to rural houses that are worthless.
I mean worthless.

#10

No chance. People who bought in commuter belt at bubble prices can forget about moving back to the city.

#11

Dont forget the apartment owners who will retain the millstone.

#12

I’ve had a look on MyHome, but I can’t find a way to check how many properties are for sale in Co.Dublin, any tips? Is there any place on the web that compiles MyHome stats? I had a search through the areas that I’m interested in, but there didn’t seem to be more than a handful of additional properties on MyHome compared to Daft. I’d love to be proved wrong on this.

I can’t do any better regarding zeroing in on Dublin houses. From Daftwatch “Split of data for houses, apartments, flats and studios is only available for data collected after 2008-10-08.” But still, you can draw a lot of conclusions from the dataset analysed.

**Edit: ** Just came across this new blog entry from Ronan Lyons The level of transactions in property and the emergence of regional property markets. He comes to similar conclusion as myself, such as:

#13

“can anyone tell me why the Dublin housing market isn’t in a relatively robust position”

Dublin isn’t London, Manhattan or Tokyo. Dublin is a provincial backwater on the outskirts of Europe – nothing more.

I suggest you live outside it for a while and then take a look at the stats. The property market in Dublin is screwed period.

#14

Leonard.

This is historic stuff that used to perplex the Pin in 2007 somewhat . You are asking the wrong questions mate but here are some answers . :slight_smile:

  1. Myhome is now and always was bigger than Daft in Dublin and I think Wicklow. Daft utterly dominates everywhere else , sometimes by a factor of 10x myhome . Daft dominates Dublin in rental but not Galway for example .
  2. Myhome changed all their prices from text to graphics precisely to stop sites like IPW from monitoring prices. They were pressurised by Ken McDonald and his mates .
  3. Other sites are monitored by treesdontgrowtothesky.com and the facts are very well presented , propertynews.com comes to mind , the second largest national site after Daft .
  4. Dunno who monitors property.ie , the fourth largest site ( maybe even the third biggest now , I have not checked) .

I have confidential information from a large EA company on the relative size of these sites , Daft is around 70k , Propertynews around 50k and myhome only 25k listings but overweight in Dublin, property.ie …dunno.

#15

MyHome go through a lot of trouble to hide this information so I’ve never even attempted to do anything similar to Daftwatch, they obviously don’t want the information out there and I’d rather not risk their wrath :stuck_out_tongue:

From what I understand though MyHome have always had a much larger collection of properties in Dublin than Daft. You can glean some stats from their mobile site at m.myhome.ie.

The original Daftwatch never collected the data so there is not much that can be done really, but as you said you can still draw a few conclusions from the data. The main thing to keep in mind is that the data is only a small representative sample and doesn’t take into account variables such as market share.

#16

Is the difference between the daft.ie and myhome.ie figures not the Sherry Fitz/Gunne/DNG factor?

#17

Even when Myhome were not trying to deliberately hide reality with their unreadable price data they only returned 300 results per search which made it hard to get stats , they are still at that caper.

#18

Which can be gotten round, we had a fair amount of discussion a few years back.

#19

My quick ‘back of an envelope’ notes from searching through myHome and Daft for specific areas confirms that myHome has a far greater market share in the Dublin house sales market.

Houses Listed for Sale on 29/07/2009

Area in Dublin, MyHome, Daft, Difference

Leopardstown, 25, 15, 67%
Dundrum, 40, 25, 60%
Foxrock, 41, 32, 28%
Sandyford, 33, 27, 22%
Rathfarnham, 144, 104, 38%
Ballinteer, 28, 24, 17%

Totals, 311 , 227, 37%

Daft numbers comprises searches for House, Bungalow, and Duplex

MyHome numbers are for a search comprising Bungalow, Cottage, Country house, Detached house, Dormer, Duplex, End of terrace, Holiday home, Mews, Period house, Semi detached, Terrace house, Townhouse

It is unfortunate that nobody has been able to keep a record of the trends on myHome, and thus not been able to keep a reliable record of the trends in the amount of Dublin houses for sale. I appreciate that I’m relatively new to this game of analysing the market, apologies if this ground has been covered back in 2007. But I’m sure a lot of people could benefit from the wisdom of experienced pinsters on this topic. :slight_smile:

#20

I forgot to mention Property Vultures too, my bad

property-vultures.com/

This thread in particular may be of help to you . It dates back to 2007 . You are free to bring it up to date if you so wish :slight_smile:
Watch out for Crashandburn and their territorial attitude towards ‘their’ threads . PM me to bitchslap him if he causes any grief . Here you are.

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=870&hilit=count

Back in 2007 most people thought the Pin were loons and we understood the need for empirical data to prove our point .

In reaction to efforts to quantify what was on MyHome the reaction from Myhome was to deliberately obfuscate the data on their site …changing prices to graphics 2 years ago to break monitoring sites. The poor dears forgot to change a feature whereby they showed the cost per month of the mortgage at around 3% which enabled the trivial reversal of the price from this data .

About 6 months later they finally copped onto that too :smiley:

We are rather more mainstream nowadays , PIN spin offs like IPW are quoted in the media every week.

But IPW and Treesdontgrowtothesky and property-vultures.com only exist because real data on Irish House prices is hidden from us by our banks and our estate agents and especially our government . They serve to fill a yawning information gap.