Is the property market that ‘hot’

Irish homes put up for sale are going from first to final offer within 10 days, according to a report by property website Daft.ie. It is quite some development and makes you wonder why prices in Dublin, in particular, have been going south of late.

This is based on figures from Offers by Daft, a platform for buyers to bid on properties directly through Daft.ie. It has seen 10,206 offers made through the platform, since it launched in 2022, on 1,324 properties.

On average, properties advertised on the bidding platform received a first offer within three days of going live and went to a winning offer within 10 days, the report said.

The findings suggest a certain frenzy in the market, as does the attached commentary. “The data is telling us that the market is hot!” it says.

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[ Property prices in urban zones falling, report finds ]

In the latest residential property price index, published earlier this month, the Central Statistics Office poured some cold water on market sentiment with figures that showed prices in Dublin fell at an annual rate of 1.9 per cent, the sharpest rate of drop since 2012.

The Daft sample quoted is small. Sherry FitzGerald is Ireland’s largest estate agent and its recent results announcement was that it sold 8,600 homes last year and had a market share of 14 per cent. This suggests that more than 61,400 homes were sold here last year.

[ Dublin house prices decline by 1.9% as higher interest rates deter buyers ]

Also, in an interview in August with BusinessPlus magazine, Adam Ferguson, chief commercial officer of Distilled Media, which operates Daft.ie, suggested that take-up for the bidding platform had been slow up to that point. According to the piece, about 150 vendors at any given time were using the platform, while there were about 18,000 vendors using the more traditional Daft.ie sales tools.

The property market isn’t immune to digital disruption of course but for now prospective buyers would do well not to get sucked into panic buying.