Irish annual house-price inflation reached a 10-year high in the past three months, Daft.ie said on Monday, as the market remains “starved” of supply despite “tentative” signs of a nascent recovery in the volume of second-hand homes being sold in Dublin.
Listed home prices were, on average, 12.3 per cent higher in the second quarter of the year than in the same period in 2024, the property website said in its latest house-price report.
This is the highest rate of inflation since the first quarter of 2015, a spike that prompted the Central Bank of Ireland to introduce its mortgage lending limits, said Ronan Lyons, associate professor of economics at Trinity College Dublin and author of the report.
However, he said that while the 2015 spike in prices was largely concentrated in Dublin and its environs, the current period of skyrocketing house price inflation is “far more broadly based”.
Apart from Connacht-Ulster, prices are now climbing by double-digit percentages in every other region, Daft said.
Home prices in the midlands were 16.5 per cent higher in the second quarter compared with the same period last year. Excluding Dublin, prices in Leinster were 14.3 per cent higher than in the second quarter of 2024.
In Munster, the annual rate of house-price inflation surged to 11.9 per cent, which Daft said was the steepest rate of increase since a 14 per cent spike in the first 15-or-so months of the Covid-19 pandemic, up to the middle of 2021.
Across Dublin, meanwhile, average house prices surged by 12.3 per cent over the 12 months to June, Daft said. The median price of a newly built home in Dublin between October 2024 and March 2025 was €444,000, up 10 per cent in one year.
A healthy market is probably above 30,000, but at least these latest figures show a step in the right direction
— Ronan Lyons
The current spike is being driven by a shortage of properties – both newly constructed and second-hand – coming to market, Mr Lyons said.
The supply of second-hand homes has been particularly weak since the European Central Bank began lifting interest rates in a bid to contain soaring consumer price inflation across the euro area in July 2022.
“Those increases were well-flagged, giving existing homeowners time to fix interest rates – but fixing, of course, reduces mobility,” Mr Lyons said. “In 2024, just 50,000 homes were put up for sale, putting the market much closer to its Covid-era low than the pre-Covid average.”
However, he said there are some early signs that the second-hand market in Dublin is beginning to turn a corner as interest rates continue to fall.
While the volume of second-hand homes put up for sale was down again in the second quarter across much of the Republic, it grew by a modest 3 per cent in Dublin.
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“Ultimately, the market is still starved of supply,” said Mr Lyons. “But the total number of homes for sale on June 1st was over 12,000, compared to below 9,300 on March 1st. A healthy market is probably above 30,000, but at least these latest figures show a step in the right direction.”
Central Statistics Office figures published last week revealed that house prices grew at an average annual rate of 7.5 per cent in April amid ongoing supply shortages and surging demand fuelled by Government incentives and expectations of further interest rate cuts.
Meanwhile, The Irish Times reported on Friday that the Government is discussing a delay to its new housing plan until after the summer.
Senior Government figures said the new plan could not be completed until the publication of a review of how the State is going to fund its multi-year infrastructure delivery programme, which is now expected in late July.
