I am Irish and I live in Ireland. I am surrounded by other Irish people.
Being Irish, we love property;
- We love to buy property,
- We love to live in our own property
- We love to invest in property
We talk about property all the time. We’ve had property busts and booms, and a boom again.
So I wanted to look at publicly available property data.
In 2012 the Irish Government set up the PRSA and instituted the Property price Register. It was after the property bust of 2008 and it was thought a good idea to have a public record of what was happening in the property market.
To quote TheJournal.ie,
“The register provides the price, address and date of sale on all residential properties which have been purchased in Ireland since 1 January 2010 and allows people to view the prices of houses which have been sold around the country.
There had been calls for such a register to be set up for several years in order to provide open information on a notoriously secretive area.”
Furthermore to quote the Independent, quoting the PRSA,
“The PSRA has said that the register is not intended to be a property price index but instead is designed to “provide, on an ongoing basis, accurate prices of residential properties purchased at a particular date”.
In response to queries about the accuracy of the figures provided on the site the PSRA has put up a note saying that it does not edit the data but simply publishes the figures which are filed by the purchaser’s solicitor.
“The Authority acknowledges that there are errors in the data,” the note reads. “Where errors are discovered or reported to the Authority they will be taken up with the Revenue Commissioners”.
As it turns out this is correct. The register is a disgrace. There are many deficiencies as follows
- Very little information(few fields. No geographic information other than address)
- Vague brackets of measurement (size)
- Many empty records(ie certain fields not filled out. Eg. Description and size)
- Incorrect prices filed
- Spelling mistakes in the data, making a nonsense of the information
- Also a sale may represent a single house or apartment, or a complete block of apartments or batch of houses. So the median is a more representative measure of house value than the mean.
It makes one wonder what the point of the database was in the first place.
On the plus side
- It exists!
- It is publicly available.
- Using certain tools, you can augment the given information.
Shane Lynn has a website where he makes available a python script(also R) that utilises Google Maps’ geocoding tool to add geographical information to the property price register. It is a little complex to setup but is a great resource. You can access his website here.
So, now that we have data available, I have created some maps.
The first is a heat map showing the different statistics for each Postal Area of Dublin in the years 2010 to 2019(Currently January).
Using the measures option on the right you can choose to show various statistics on the prices for that area:
- max
- min
- median
- mean
And then
- sum
is just to tally up the total amount of house sales in that region per year.
The second is a map of every property(that could be geocoded) in the Dublin area, its address, its sale date and its price(as well as, of course, its location).
I do want to present some further information in this area and will do so at a later date.
Thanks for reading and looking. Please let me know what you think.
Resources
https://www.propertypriceregister.ie/website/npsra/pprweb.nsf/page/ppr-home-en
https://www.thejournal.ie/property-price-register-ireland-633239-Oct2012/