Ronan Lyons

The Housing Essay is a new recurring deepdive from a rotating variety of voices into issues impacting the property crisis in Ireland. Are there potential solutions that may be currently overlooked or traditionally ignored by policymakers? Today, housing and economics expert Ronan Lyons looks at a key data point.

HOMES ARE STILL selling above the list price – but the frenzy is cooling.

The typical home in Ireland sold for 5.5% more than its original listed price in the
second quarter of 2026, according to the latest Daft.ie Sales Report. In other words, a property put on the market at €400,000 changed hands, on average, for roughly €22,000 above that figure.

That gap – the difference between what a seller asks for and what a buyer ultimately pays – is what we call “market heat”. When buyers are scrambling and supply is tight, properties sell for more than the list price and the gap turns positive. When the market is weak and sellers are chasing buyers, homes sell for less than what was listed and the gap turns negative.

Because it compares the final price recorded on the State’s Property Price Register with the very first price advertised on Daft.ie, it is a clean read on how much competition there is for each home. For more than 250,000 sales since 2010, it has been possible to link the two.

The direction of travel

At 5.5%, the market is still firmly in sellers’ territory. But the striking thing is the direction of travel. Market heat peaked at 6.8% in the third quarter of 2025 – the highest reading in the entire series – and has now fallen for three quarters in a row, to 6.4%, then 5.8%, and now 5.5%. A year ago, in the second quarter of 2025, the gap stood at 6.3%. So while bidding is still pushing prices above the list price, it is doing so by noticeably less than it was twelve months ago.

To appreciate how unusual today’s figures are, it helps to look back further. In 2011, at the depths of the crash, the typical home sold for about 10% below its list price – sellers were repeatedly cutting prices and still struggling to find a buyer. That remained true, on average, right through 2012 and 2013.

The market only clawed its way back to “asking equals selling” around 2014 and 2015, and even then it was Dublin that turned first, while much of the rest of the country was still selling at a discount. The gap drifted modestly positive in the late-2010s boom, dipped slightly negative during the early months of the pandemic in 2020, then surged as the post-Covid scramble for housing took hold – reaching successive highs in 2021, 2022 and again in 2024 and 2025.

Seen against that backdrop, the last year looks less like a downturn and more like the top of a very hot market finally coming off the boil. The heat is easing, but from an extraordinary high – a typical home today still sells for thousands of euro over its listed price, something that would have seemed fanciful for most of the past 15 years.

Where you are buying matters, though, and the regional picture is far from uniform.

Dublin remains the hottest market in the country, with homes selling for 7.1% above list prices in the second quarter – but it is also where the cooling is clearest, down sharply from 8.7% a year earlier. Munster is close behind at 6.7%, and has barely moved over the year, leaving it as the most competitive market outside the capital.

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The rest of Leinster sits at 4.1%, while Connacht-Ulster is the coolest region at 3.4%, down from 4.0% a year ago. The pattern is the same one that has run through this market for years: heat is concentrated in and around the cities, where demand most outstrips the supply of homes for sale, and is thinnest in the more rural parts of the country.

For buyers, the message is mixed. The days of having to bid nearly 10% over the listed price to have a real change of securing the home may be passing – but in most of the country, and especially in Dublin and Munster, the listed price is still best read as a floor rather than a ceiling.

Ronan Lyons is a professor in Economics in Trinity College Dublin and one of Ireland’s leading analysts of the housing with a particular focus on how local outcomes (such as population or housing prices) are affected by bigger factors (such as trade policy).

• Journal Media Ltd has shareholders in common with Daft.ie publisher Distilled Media Group.