Comments on: Northern Ireland residential property prices still declining

By: namawinelake

namawinelake — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 14:03:49 +0000

@Stephen, sadly you’re probably right and there seems little appetite to exceed the very basic requirement imposed on us by the IMF. The Property Price Register seems riddled with errors, the Phoenix magazine – 2012 Annual now on sale at all good newsagents for €4.95 – reports that the purchase of “Woodside” at 18 Shrewsbury Road in Dublin in 2012 by Seamus Fitzpatrick was “understood to be somewhere north of €5m” whilst the PPR indicates €1.7m which the Phoenix says “is understood to be an error”

Minister Shatter has ruled out extending the PPR to pre 2010 transactions and recently in the Dail, he refused to entertain enhancing the PPR with basic information like whether the subject property is a house or an apartment, the number of bedrooms, the square footage, the site area and the local authority area

http://oireachtasdebates.oireachtas.ie/debates%20authoring/debateswebpack.nsf/takes/dail2012111400030?opendocument

By: Stephen

Stephen — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 11:39:40 +0000

I wouldn’t hold your breath on a proper index based on the register anytime soon. The data is much too messy and there is still entries being added to 2010 in every update.
Worse is when you have multiple properties in one stamp. Some are easy to pick out, others you end up having to exclude based on being outside of the normal range. That becomes difficult due to the low number of transactions.
To further top it off, the price in the register may not actually be the sale price of the property, but the sale price less the cost of fixtures and fittings (or whatever they want to call it), which further pushes prices around.

By: namawinelake

namawinelake — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 11:20:59 +0000

@Gregory, both points well made. Unfortunately the UK does not produce inflation by country within the UK, so all we have is the national inflation rate – this might be addressed if the UK start to differentiate welfare payments by country as has been signalled.

As for Northern Ireland being a region and not a nation-state, it is formally a country with a substantial amount of devolved powers. Given our status as an IMF programme country and our relationship with Europe at present, we’re not a million miles different.

By: Gregory Connor

Gregory Connor — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 11:12:54 +0000

Northern Ireland is a region not a nation-state so it is not a valid comparison to rank it on a list consisting only of nation-states. Lots of regions have had worse crashes I would guess (Nevada, 1930s Florida, others?). Also you have used UK national inflation to deflate a regional house price index which again makes it a bit inconsistent with the other entries on the list where the house price index and consumer price index refer to the same entity. But these quibbles do not erase your main point — this shows that the Republic of Ireland still has lots of potential downside price movement.