A NEW database to monitor market trends and house prices is to be established under legislation announced yesterday.
Details of property sales prices are to be made public in an effort to bring transparency to the troubled housing market.
Announcing the move, Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern said responsibility for publishing property sales prices would be given to the Property Services Regulatory Authority (PRSA).
Information on house prices is severely restricted under data protection legislation, which makes it an offence for an estate agent to reveal the sale price of a property without the consent of both the buyer and the seller.
Auctioneers are sceptical that the proposed new property price database will be available anytime soon since the PRSA itself has not yet been put on a statutory basis.
The body was established in 2006 to regulate the estate agency business which at the time was seen to be misleading buyers and sellers on house values.
Enacting legislation for the body was not published until last year. It passed through the Seanad in June 2010. Mr Ahern said he would table amendments to the Property Services (Regulation) Bill 2009 to finally establish the authority on a statutory basis during the next Dáil session.
“The Property Services Regulatory Authority will be in a position to ensure timely publication of this data as soon as the legislation is enacted later this year,” he said.
A spokesman for the PRSA, which operates from fully staffed offices in Navan, Co Meath, said he could not comment until he had seen the amendments.
Alan Cooke, chief executive of the Irish Auctioneers & Valuers, said a new property database should be transparent as in other EU countries, where buyers and sellers can access details of all sales via the internet. “Our preference would be to make the system transparent and to backdate it over time. Once established this would help economic planning at a national level.”
Mr Cooke warned against the PRSA providing only “generic information” ie the average price of houses area by area rather than a comprehensive register of all house prices.
There is already confusion as to how the data will be collected and published.
The Minister said the Department of the Environment would create and maintain the database in which the details of residential and commercial property sales would be maintained for statistical purposes. However, it would be the PRSA’s job to publish the information.
It is not yet clear whether the information will be published on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
Simon Ensor, a director of Sherry FitzGerald, would like to see the database backdated.
“If the new Bill only covers future sales it will be a number of years before it will be helpful from an analysis point of view. Whereas if it allows for retrospective information it will be very valuable immediately.”
However, a legal source said the publication of past houses prices could be challenged on privacy grounds.
Mr Ensor said everybody in the industry agreed that a date base was urgently needed to bring some clarity to the market.