Market starved of information

HOUSE SALES:FIGURES FROM the Revenue on stamp duty on sales of houses and apartments in the first half of 2008 confirm what we all know - the property sales arrow is still pointing firmly downwards.

Revenue's stamp duty take fell from €588m in the first half of 2007 to €260m for the same period in 2008. The number of properties sold was down from 24,000 to 15,000 and there is no suggestion of a let-up.

Further evidence of the crisis in property is provided by Homebond and Premier which registered 616 houses and apartments this August, down from 2,134 in August last year. Together, they provide deposit and structural guarantees to the buyers of most new houses and apartments. Their figures are published by the Department of the Environment.

Every month this year showed a significant drop in their figures compared to the same month last year, with March being the most serious decline - down from 5,142 registrations in March last year to just 1,312 this March.

Not all official figures show the decline. Land Registry figures show that 187,000 dealings were lodged in the first nine months of 2008 compared to 192,000 in the first nine months of 2007, hardly a major fall. "We are a bit perplexed as to why the numbers have not fallen off here," says solicitor Michael Treacy of the Property Registration Authority, an umbrella organisation for the Land Registry and the Registry of Deeds. Registration of titles and deeds comes at the end of the process of buying a property which might account for the delay.

With the market in the doldrums, questions are being raised on why more detailed information on this sector is still not readily available to the market. How much is a house worth and who sets the price? The simple answer is that the market sets the price. This answer, in a market starved of detailed information, is almost meaningless.

Little has happened since the controversy earlier this year when some estate agents were suspected of feeding exaggerated sales prices to the newspapers. Reform is possible. In England and Wales, the Land Registration Act of 2002 introduced in October 2003 a new era of transparency of sale prices of houses and apartments. Various Land Registry documents are now available to the public. France, the Netherlands and Sweden are other countries which require the market to be furnished with necessary information.

Ireland has some way to go. But one senior official in the Property Registration Authority was not optimistic at the prospect of getting agreement among the various interested parties here to improve the information released to the market.

• Pat Igoe is a solicitor in Blackrock, Co Dublin