Meeting to resolve dispute over property price publication

ORGANISATIONS WITH a vested interest in the property market will meet in Dublin today to seek to resolve a dispute over the publication of sale prices.

The issue arose when it emerged in April that The Irish Timeshad written to some estate agents expressing concern about exaggerated sales prices being submitted for publication in its property supplement.

Speaking in advance of the meeting, the president of the Irish Auctioneers and Valuers Institute (IAVI) called for data protection laws to be amended to allow for the publication of property sale prices without requiring the consent of buyers and sellers.

Edward Carey said this would allow for the compilation of a national database that the public could access for all house and land sale prices.

Mr Carey, whose organisation represents more than 2,000 estate agents, argued that auctioneers were caught between two "competing and contradictory pieces of legislation".

"On the one hand, the National Consumer Agency demands that we provide very specific information about property prices. On the other, the Data Protection Act prohibits us from releasing that information without the consent of both seller and buyer. This consent is not always available, as many private citizens do not want that information to become public," he said.

When the issue of falsely reported sale prices came to light in late April, it caused a dispute between the IAVI and the National Consumer Agency (NCA), whose chief executive, Ann Fitzgerald, expressed "very serious concerns" about the accuracy of private-treaty sale prices that were being published in the press.

Auctioneers' groups agreed to comply with a demand from the NCA to address the issue and said that terms such as "region of" or "above" would not in future be submitted for publication. But the IAVI then argued that this would make the property market less transparent as, under data protection legislation, the publication of actual sale prices rather than rough estimates would need the consent of sellers and buyers.

In response, Ms Fitzgerald accused estate agents of using data protection legislation to fudge the question of prices. "The Data Protection Act is not new, and under it both parties have to agree to the prices being published," she said. "Either that has been happening or it hasn't, and if it has not been happening to date then estate agents have been in breach of that legislation for years."

Bodies attending today's meeting include the National Consumers' Association, the Departments of Environment, Justice and Enterprise, the National Property Services Regulatory Authority and the Law Society.