To ask the Minister for Justice to discuss the improvement of the residential property price register by the inclusion of readily available information such as whether or not the property is a house or an apartment, the number of bedrooms, the square footage, the site area and the local authority area.
REVISED TEXT: The need to improve the residential property price register by the inclusion of additional relevant readily available information.
Deputy Ciaran Lynch
Opening Statement by Minister for Justice, Equality and Defence
I thank Deputy Lynch for raising this important issue. The Property Services Regulatory Authority, which comes under the aegis of my Department, published the Residential Property Price Register on 30 September 2012. All of the information on the Register is publicly available, free of charge, at www.propertypriceregister.ie. The Register has been produced by the Authority under Section 86 of the Property Services (Regulation) Act 2011, which explicitly provides that the register of residential property prices shall contain the address of the property, the price at which the property was sold and the date of sale of the property.
The Register includes information on residential properties purchased in Ireland since 1 January 2010, as declared to the Revenue Commissioners for stamp duty purposes. It contains the price paid for individual properties and contains details of all residential sales – both cash sales and sales with mortgage. The particulars published in the Register include the price, the date of sale and the address (including house number) of each residential property sold in Ireland since 1 January 2010. The information will be updated on a regular basis and, for the most part, the information will be published within a month of the date of sale of the property.
The Register can be searched by reference to a number of criteria including all sales by county, city or town, individual property address and by year. This important new facility will enable members of the public to discover easily and quickly prices paid for properties sold in Ireland. It provides buyers and sellers of residential property with a service they have previously lacked namely, accurate and up-to-date information on the market price of individual properties.
The publication of the Residential Property Prices Database fulfils a key commitment in the Programme for Government – “to improve the quality of information available on the Irish housing market by requiring that the selling price of all dwellings is recorded in a publicly available, national house price database.” The establishment of such a database was first recommended many years ago. In my first year in office, as Minister for Justice, Equality and Defence, I prioritised enactment of the Property Services (Regulation) Act 2011 to, among other things, facilitate establishment of the Residential Property Price Register. Accordingly, I formally established the Property Services Regulatory Authority on a statutory basis on 3 April 2012.
In recent years, because of the steep downturn in the property market, it has been difficult to get accurate information on property prices. This uncertainty has led to a lack of investor confidence and may have contributed to stagnation in the property market, particularly among first time buyers. The publication of the Residential Property Price Register should help to remove some of this uncertainty, restore some confidence in the property market and provide transparency in residential property sale prices.
I note the Deputy’s view that other information should be included in the Register, such as whether the property is a house or apartment, the number of bedrooms, the square footage of the property, the site area and the local authority area. In this context, it is important to note that the Register is not intended to serve as a “Property Price Index”. In accordance with the legislation, the details made available on the property price register are limited to price, address and date of sale and do not include such details as property size or number of rooms. The Register is simply designed to provide on an ongoing basis, accurate prices of residential properties purchased at a particular date. Indeed, as I have already mentioned, the information contained in the Register is derived from information declared to the Revenue Commissioners for stamp duty purposes. The categories of information sought for inclusion on the Register are not included in the information which is submitted to the Revenue for stamp duty purposes.