A decade when prices got very dear

CityLiving A report to mark 10 years of a house price index shows how much the market has changed, writes Edel Morgan

At the start of the mid-1990s, a few years before the property boom began in earnest, a girl who worked in the same civil service building as me bought an apartment off Patrick Street, Dublin 8 for around €38,000.

I remember a few young singletons in the office, including myself, being in awe that she had the wherewithal to get a mortgage on a clerical officer's salary when it seemed so hopelessly out of our grasp. When we visited her at the apartment, which was built under the Section 23 urban renewal scheme, I remember thinking how daring and cosmopolitan she was living in her own pad on the fringes of the city centre.

More than a decade on and that apartment is worth more than 10 times what she paid for it and the nation's attitude towards buying property has utterly changed. If the rest of us had even an inkling back then of the future, we would have spent more time looking at ways to earn extra money to buy a place and less time in Zoo bar (now Renards) which was located under the office.

In the last decade we have become far less cautious as a nation about borrowing large sums of money to buy property (and despite warnings from the Central Bank, financial institutions have adopted a gung-ho approach to lending it).

My former colleague was ahead of her time but if, as a young female she were buying today, no-one would bat an eyelid.

Since the property boom began single women have become a force to be reckoned with in the market with IFG Mortgages finding last year in a survey that women are buying their first property younger than men - although prices in the greater Dublin area have now edged out of many single first-time buyers' reach.

A new retrospective report by Permanent Tsb and the ERSI to mark 10 years of their house price index brings home just how much the market has changed.

Cast your mind back to 1996 when the average national house price was just €75,000 with a price difference of just €10,000 between Dublin and elsewhere. A first-time buyer could have bought a place for an average of €69,792 nationally and could have traded up for around €20,000 more.

Interestingly, second-hand houses were less prized than they are now and cost nearly €8,000 less than new ones. The majority of houses (85 per cent) cost under €100,000 and Galway was the most expensive county to live in with an average house costing €92,588.

Dublin was next at €92,342, with Wicklow third at €84,763. The cheapest place to live was Tipperary at €57,006, with Laois marginally ahead at €57,090. Semi-detached houses were the most common property types, followed by detached houses, with apartments only accounting for 6 per cent of the total.

By 2005 the average house price had risen to €280,000 and the gap between prices in Dublin and outside had risen by a whopping €120,000. The national price difference between a first-time buyer property and second-time properties increased by over €40,000 and there was a complete reversal in the 1996 price differential between new and second-hand properties, with second-hand an average of nearly €8,000 more than new.

Wicklow experienced the most dramatic price growth in the country at 310 per cent, with Dublin second at 299 per cent and Cork making a considerable leap to third place with 298 per cent.

Tipperary jumped to fourth place with a 295 per cent increase in prices.

Interestingly, Galway, which was the most expensive county in 1996, came in the bottom five of counties nationally for price growth at only 202 per cent with Roscommon the lowest at 195 per cent.

Remaining unchanged is the dominance of the semi-d and the relatively low numbers of apartments nationally - at 8 per cent of the overall figure there has been only a 2 per cent rise in the number of apartments since 1996, and this is despite the introduction of the high density guidelines to combat urban sprawl in some areas.

While in Dublin apartment building rose by nearly 6 per cent to 18 per cent over the period of the survey, the numbers of apartments outside Dublin remains almost unchanged.