Yesterday the Irish Times reported that the Property Services Regulatory Authority (PRSA) hope to have a property register live by June 2012 that will give information on house price sales and commercial leases for 2010 and 2011.  The register will give a valuable insight into the housing and commercial market going forward and is to be welcomed.  What it won’t do is give us a detailed retrospective view of the property market at the tail of the boom and through the crash given the 2010 base date.

In collaboration with Ronan Lyons, Oxford University and economist at daft.ie, NIRSA through its AIRO project has been working on producing a set of maps charting various aspects of the housing market including asking price and rental yield using Daft.ie‘s database.  This database includes over 980,000 rental observations and over 600,000 sales observations from 2006 through to the present day.  Importantly, the maps are at sub-county scale, plotted into over 1,000 geographical units made of aggregates of EDs and EAs.  We hope to launch the interactive mapping tool in the coming weeks, but thought we’d give a brief taster on IAN of some of the preliminary output.  The maps below are examples of our initial work and look at 3 bed semi (or equivalent) deciles of asking price , rental asking price, and rental yield. The new mapping tool will contain sales and rental prices for 2-bed, 3-bed, 4-bed and a weighted average for all 1-5 beds. Prices wil be avilable for the peak (2007 q3), current prices (2011 q3) and % fall in the average price.

Once the interactive mapping tool is launched we’ll provide some more maps and analysis of the material.

Justin Gleeson and Rob Kitchin