Home truths as register lifts the lid on prices

The new Government-backed database of house prices promises no more in-the-region- ofs, but will it make a difference to prospective buyers?

EVER WONDERED how much the neighbours paid for number 42? Come the summer, a new property-price register will facilitate your nosiness. Simply type an address into the Government-backed database and you’ll be able to find out who the hardy hagglers are on your street.

In an example of closing the door on the overpriced three-bed semi after the boom had bolted, Fianna Fáil pledged legislation to create the database in August 2010.

Signed into law two months ago, the Bill is awaiting commencement orders that should deliver a searchable house-price database by the end of June. The prices will be collated from the Revenue Commissioners, says Tom Lynch, head of the Property Services Regulatory Authority.

With conveyancing solicitors required to make a return for stamp-duty purposes, all the information is already there. “There will be no ‘in the region of’ or ‘about this’ or ‘about that’ to it,” says Lynch, who is overseeing the registry’s creation. “It will be the absolute accurate price.”

But with recommendations for such a register dating back as far as 1975, why the delay?

Angela Keegan, managing director of myhome.ie, says it has had to do with privacy. "A lot of buyers don't want people to know what they are paying, and a lot of sellers don't want people to know what they got," she says.

Despite long-standing databases in England, Wales and New Zealand, there has been a lack of appetite for one here. "Property is a sensitive subject in Ireland," says Ronan Lyons of daft.ie, "and up until now there hasn't really been a push from government on it."

Indeed, with prices here long cloaked in estate-agent-speak, and the sale prices of nonauction houses remaining unknown, obfuscation seemed to suit many.

In 2008 the head of the National Consumer Agency warned estate agents that they could reveal only exact sale prices. But until now data-protection legislation has prevented agents from doing so without permission from vendor and buyer – permission that’s seldom forthcoming. The new legislation addresses this problem head on.

Ed Carey, chairman of the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland residential group, doesn’t agree that the lack of clarity served estate agents. “We were never not looking for it. We’ve always been calling for the register. It’s long overdue,” he says, adding that if anyone reaped benefits from the lack of clarity it was sellers. “The estate agent acts for the vendor. What the vendor was paying me to do was to get the best price for the house: that was the estate agent’s role.”

Carey believes that cheap finance was the primary driver of prices, not a lack of clarity about them.

Though Revenue is believed to have accurate house-price data stretching back to 2001, the database will initially include information only from January 2010. So that self-satisfied feeling about how little you paid for your preboom house and how much the neighbours paid for theirs is ruled out for now.

The database won’t provide any detail about house type, either, such as the number of rooms or whether there is a garden, says Lynch. “We hope to produce more definitive information, but that’s going to take time.”

Savills’ head of residential property, Ronan O’Driscoll, says that “Google Maps and your own reconnaissance” can help the very curious. Welcoming the register, O’Driscoll says it will at last provide genuine evidence about what properties are worth. “But we’ve been hearing about this for so many years at this stage that I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Published sooner, would it have prevented the inflation of a bubble that has since burst so disastrously? “There was such a frenzy around property, and finance was so available, I don’t think it would have made any difference,” says Angela Keegan. But she says that while an asking price was almost the starting point for a vendor during the boom, now it’s what the vendor would like to get. The database will clarify things even further, she believes.

“Information is an important tool for consumers, and really that was missing in the bubble,” says Ronan Lyons.

With the official CSO index based on mortgage drawdowns only, and excluding cash purchases – a quarter to a third of all current sales, say agents – today’s buyers are still working in a vacuum.

Justice Minister Alan Shatter hopes the national registry will “revive confidence” in residential property, but can it do the trick?

“I don’t think it will provide a massive impact one way or the other in terms of getting activity going,” says Ronan O’Driscoll. “All it will do is provide a bit more comfort to people making offers on properties that they are not overpaying for them.”