Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for raising this issue. I know it is one in which he has a personal interest.

The Property Services Regulatory Authority which comes under the aegis of my Department published the Residential Property Price Register as recently as 30 September. All of the information on the register is publicly available, free of charge, on its website. 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 the State since 1 January 2010, as declared to the Revenue Commissioners for stamp duty purposes. It contains the price paid for individual properties and details of all residential sales, both cash sales and sales with mortgages. 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, is published within one 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 year. This important new facility enables 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 on the date of sale.

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 the database was first recommended many years ago. In my first year in office as Minister I prioritised enactment of the required legislation, among other things, to facilitate the establishment of the Residential Property Price Register. Accordingly, I formally established the Property Services Regulatory Authority on a statutory basis on 3 April last. The register was put online with praiseworthy speed.

In recent years, because of the steep downturn in the property market, it has been difficult to obtain 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 register should, I hope, help to remove some of this uncertainty, restore some confidence in the property market and provide for some transparency in residential property sale prices. However, it cannot solve all of the problems impacting on the property market.

I note the Deputy's view that other information should be included in the register such as whether a property is a house or an apartment, the number of bedrooms, the square footage, the site area and the local authority area. It is important to note in this context 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. They do not include such details as property size or number of rooms. Individuals interested in particular properties who look them up on the website have the facility to visit the area if they are not familiar with it and readily identify whether they are talking about a detached house, a semi-detached house, an apartment, a cottage, a bungalow or any other type of construction. The register has simply been designed to provide on an ongoing basis accurate prices of residential properties purchased on a particular date. As I have mentioned, the information contained therein is derived from the 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 submitted to Revenue for stamp duty purposes. Accordingly, it would not be possible to include the information the Deputy is seeking in the register.

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