As it doesn’t appear to be freely available elsewhere, I am publishing here information provided to me by the Revenue which shows stamp duty receipts and transaction volumes from 2003 onwards on both residential and commercial transactions.
First up, residential. It doesn’t show exempt transactions (including those involving some first time buyers and a lot of new house sales) so you can’t see the overall size of the residential market, but it does provide some helpful information particularly on the level of receipts from stamp duty and the transactions by band value. I did consider working out the total value of property transacted which was subject to stamp duty but (a) it’s complicated by having different rates for first time buyers and others and (b) stamp duty transactions are an unknown proportion of total transactions (including self-builds) so the results wouldn’t tell you the overall size of the market.
And residential values
Of more interest perhaps is the stamp duty information relating to commercial property transactions. I think the jury is still out on the volume of transactions where stamp duty was deferred or was avoided/minimised through the sale of property via transferring the shares in a company. Interestingly volumes have not been as severely affected in 2009 as you might have expected from some media reporting – volumes were only down 33% from 2008. On the other hand the value of stamp duty has reduced sharply by nearly 70% in 2009 compared with 2008 but that will be in part due to the reduction in the higher stamp duty rates from up to 9% to 6% in October 2008.
And commercial values
There is a discussion about stamp duty and property tax on the irelandafternama blog.
Do you know whether Revenue have these figures broken down by different geographic regions. It would be interesting to see what’s happening with more localised housing markets
Hi Rob, I would doubt if the figures are broken down further and as far as I know they are not publicly available online. Remember that the statistics exclude exempt transactions (many new homes and most first time buyers).
Based on the above figures, it would be interesting to extrapolate how long it will take NAMA to dispose of its massive multi-billion Irish property stockpile. The residential requires certain assumptions about new-build first timer homes, but the commercial can be calculated easily. On first glance, at 2008/2009 levels, it looks like it will take generations!