The Residential Property Price Register, Summarised and Visualised

The Residential Property Price Register (RPPR) was launched on Sunday (30 Sept 2012) by the Property Services Regulatory Authority (PSRA). It provides sale price for individual properties for all residential sales, including cash sales. The data includes the address of each property sold, the date of sale, and the price. Details about the properties sold are limited, with no information about the size of each property (e.g. number of bedrooms) or site size or if a property is a house or apartment (although it does report if they are new or secondhand). It only includes property sold since January 2010. In addition the PRSA notes that ‘In a small number of transactions the price reported does not represent the full market price of the property concerned for a variety of reasons. For example, the price declared may reflect the retention of an interest in the property by the previous owner, or the fact that a part or fraction only of the property is being purchased; alternatively, the property may have been purchased at a reduced price under the Affordable Homes Scheme.’

The interactive set of data visualizations below summarize the entire dataset by local authority and individual property. Use the tabs and checkboxes to change the data displayed (please be patient for some data vizs to load, they are pulling in c.53,000 lines of data). We have provided both average sales price and the median sales price to reveal/compensate for the skewing effect of a small number of very expensive properties (see box plots).

We have used the full dataset as published. Whilst we are confident that the vast majority of the data are robust, it is also clear that there are a small number of errors/issues in the dataset. These are of two types. First, some properties have the wrong sale prices attached to them (the asking price was radically less than the recorded sales price, e.g 29 Cluain Ard, Limerick, €125 million). We think that a number of them are probably decimal point errors (e.g. the sale price should be recorded €241k not €24.1m). Second, several properties have been clumped together and not disaggregated (e.g. an entry of 30 apts for €4.5m, rather than 30 entries for €150K each). We have not cleaned these errors/issues as we do not know what the correct values should be (the use of the median prices compensates for their skewing effect). Nevertheless, the data does give us a good picture of sales prices post January 2011 in different parts of the country.