WANT TO KNOW how much the jumped-up Smiths paid for the semi on the same street as yours? Next month the new database of house prices will allow you to find out what your neighbour forked out for their house. This will be done by typing an address into the State-run database to be operated by the Property Services Regulatory Authority, the CEO of which is Tom Lynch.

With solicitors obliged to complete conveyancing promptly for stamp duty purposes, the registrations will be updated on a constant basis. From then on interested parties will no longer have to guess the selling price or try and decipher what precisely is meant by “in the region of” or “close to the asking price”.

The shame is that Fianna Fáil didn’t deliver on its pledge to set up the database when the market was hopping. In 2007 and 2008, house sales were around 400,000 per annum; by 2008 they had fallen to about half that number. They subsequently dropped to around 130,000 and when the PRSA launches the new service in a few weeks it is expected to show that between 80,000 and 100,000 houses were sold from the starting date in January, 2010 to last month.

|