Property Price Register Ireland: What It Shows and Hides

Before you bid on an Irish home, one number settles a lot of arguments: what did nearby houses actually sell for? Asking prices on the portals are hopes; the Residential Property Price Register records the real ones. It’s free, public and authoritative, but it also leaves out more than most buyers realise, and one quirk makes new-build prices look lower than they are. Here’s what the register shows, what it hides, and how to read it without being misled.

The register is a public record of residential property sales in Ireland, published by the Property Services Regulatory Authority (PSRA) at propertypriceregister.ie. It lists every residential sale filed since 1 January 2010, compiled from the stamp-duty returns buyers’ solicitors lodge with Revenue. It is the official source for sold prices, and it costs nothing to search.

Because it’s built from stamp-duty filings rather than listings, a sale only appears after it has closed and the return has been filed, so recent weeks are always thinner than they will eventually be. If a road looks quiet on the register, that can mean “not sold yet on paper”, not “nothing changed hands”.

Each entry is deliberately minimal:

That “new or second-hand” flag matters more than it looks, because of a trap the register warns about itself: new-build prices are recorded net of VAT. New homes carry VAT (13.5%); the register shows the price before it. So a new house that a buyer actually paid €400,000 for can appear on the register at roughly €352,000. Compare a new build against a nearby second-hand resale at face value and you’ll under-read the new one by around an eighth.

Source: Property Services Regulatory Authority, propertypriceregister.ie

The register answers “what did it sell for?” and nothing else. Before you treat a figure as a comparable, remember what isn’t in it:

• No size or condition. There’s no floor area, no bedroom count, no BER, no note on whether the place was renovated or a wreck. A €300,000 three-bed and a €300,000 one-bed sit side by side with nothing to separate them.
• No context on the sale. Sales between family members, part-exchanges and other non-open-market deals appear at their declared price, which may not reflect what the home would fetch on the open market.
• No address precision. Entries carry a postal address but no Eircode, so matching a register line to the exact house you’re buying (especially in a rural townland or a large apartment block) often takes judgement.

Treat the register as your reality check on asking prices, not as a valuation:

• Pull the last year or two of sales on the same street or estate, then adjust for the VAT quirk before comparing new builds to resales.
• Weigh it against sources that do capture quality and trend: the CSO’s Residential Property Price Index for direction, and the live asking prices on Daft.ie and MyHome.ie for what’s on the market now.
• Cross-check any figure that looks too low, it’s usually a new-build VAT entry or a non-market sale, not a bargain the whole street missed.

A PropertyPack report does the first step for you: it pulls recent registered sales around the property’s Eircode and shows them beside the area’s other official signals, so you can see what nearby homes actually sold for. The national property-prices guide explains the data, and each county hub carries local sold-price context: for example house prices in Dublin.