On the Move

Buying a home in Dublin can be a painful experience when you look at prices elsewhere.

Despite the substantial fall in property prices in the capital, a family home is still far from cheap.

Indeed, €500,000 might just be enough to get you a standard four-bed semi-detached in need of renovation in Dublin but, further afield, it could secure the house of your dreams.

Unsurprisingly then, despite all the talk of activity in the property market in the capital, houses are in fact still selling all around the country.

For example, in the first five months of the year there were a little less than 7,000 sales in total in Ireland (down by 7 per cent from the same period in 2012), according to the property price register, and only about a third of these were in Dublin.

And, while transaction levels have actually slid by about 14 per cent in the capital in the first five months of the year compared with the same period in 2012, restricted perhaps by issues to do with supply, volumes of sales outside of Dublin have held up better – albeit from a potentially lower base.

This relative stability in transaction levels is also feeding into higher prices. According to this week’s Central Statistics Office figures, house prices outside Dublin actually out-performed those in the capital in April, posting a monthly increase, of 1.2 per cent, for the first time in four months.

For example, activity levels have held up quite strongly in Dublin’s commuter counties, such as Wicklow, Meath and Kildare, with about 200 to 300 sales reported in each county during this period, similar to statistics from 2012.

Further afield, Galway reported a boost in sales in the first five months of the year, up from 313 in 2012 to 323, while Longford, which had the least sales across the country, at just 65 in five months, still reported a rise in activity from the same period in 2012, when 44 sales were reported.

Ireland’s second largest city, Cork, saw transactions fall by about 8 per cent in the first five months of the year, to 753. Like the capital however, supply issues might also be at play here.

For example, a friend who has been looking for a family home in Dublin for the last three years has, like us, found supply to be very poor over the past few years.

“The few rare gems that do come up are always over-subscribed,” she says. In the end, she opted to buy a site earlier this year, and was lucky to get one. The sites, on a well-situated plot in a popular suburb, were not even advertised – within 12 hours the 10 that were put up for sale were sold.

She was put on a waiting list, and when finance for one of the buyers fell through, she got her site.

However, while Ireland’s second largest city might share many of the same characteristics of the Dublin property market, this is not always the case elsewhere.

In Limerick for example, transactions fell by 16 per cent in the year to date, down to 219. And it seems to be a lack of buyers – or perhaps unrealistic prices – rather than a lack of supply, that is driving this.

Another friend, for example, found little competition when he recently went to buy a house in the city,and plenty of supply. While new listings were rare – just two new houses came onto the market while he was looking in a particular suburb – there was plenty of sitting stock, with as many as 70 houses listed for this sale in the suburb.

So, he had his pick and eventually plumped for a four-bed detached house. There was little room for negotiation, however, as the vendors were already selling below the value of their mortgage and couldn’t afford to go any lower, so he ended up paying the asking price.

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Back to Dublin. Given the predominance of executor sales and so few houses coming onto the market in walk-in condition, those that do, it seems, can attract a significant premium.

In Stillorgan, south Dublin, a new four-bedroom house with slick interiors came on the market at €500,000, but its price quickly rocketed by another €100,000 before going sale agreed.

On the other hand another house in the area, which we hadn’t considered due to its steep asking price of €625,000, just showed up on the price register as having sold for €537,000.

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Finally, we still haven't got around to doing a letter drop in our desired area, but we did get a potentially interesting call arising out of my article proposing to do just that: an agent with a "private sale".

It’s a house we didn’t even know was on the market, and it goes to show that a letter drop could really work. Some vendors, it seems, don’t want the publicity associated with a typical sales process.