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Rise in asking prices ‘highest since 2017’

The average asking price of a home listed on the property website Daft.ie rose by 9% in the year to the final quarter (Q4) of last year, its latest report shows. 

The annual increase was the biggest since 2017, and brought the average listing price to €332,109. 

The website said that the strong inflation reflected an increase, on average, of 1.4% between September and December 2024 – a time of year when listed prices normally fall back. 

Daft.ie figures also show that, during Q4, the average selling price was 6% above the listed price – a figure it describes as a measure of ‘market heat’.

The website said that the level of market heat in Q4 was the highest since the start of 2010. 

The total number of second-hand homes available to buy on Daft.ie on 1 December was just below 10,500 – down 15% year-on-year and the lowest figure since the report began in January 2007. 

Housing stock 

In a commentary on the figures, Ronan Lyons (associate professor in economics, TCD) said that, although supply was rising, it was not doing so quickly enough to keep pace with demand. 

“While completions of new homes have doubled in the last five years, it's important to remember that the overall addition to the stock of housing is quite small,” the economist stated. 

He added that a “significant chunk” of the growth in construction over the past five years had come in the private-rental and subsidised-housing sectors. 

“There is nothing at all wrong with the number of homes being built for these tenures growing – indeed, as of the late 2010s they were more starved of homes than the owner-occupied tenure. But in a country that needs more of all homes, more of some will not be enough,” Lyons said. 

New-home transactions  

He cited figures in the latest report showing that the number of new homes transacted in the open market in the first nine months of 2024 was the highest on record, since the start of the Property Price Register in 2010. 

Lyons added, however, that this figure of just over 7,200 was only marginally higher than the 2023 figure – and only 4% higher than the 6,950 transacted in the same nine months of 2018. 

The economist also highlighted pressure points in the second-hand market, where the 51,000 homes listed for sale in the year to December 2024 was the lowest figure since mid-2021. 

Lyons said that many existing homeowners had fixed their interest rates in response to higher rates in late 2021 and 2022, adding that this had “significantly affected” liquidity in the market. 

“The new government could look to implement pro-competition measures in the fixed-rate segment of the market, to try to speed up what will otherwise be a very slow return to normality over the next five years in the second-hand segment,” he concluded.