Property Special: DublinBlarney market

A recent news story in the Irish Times began: ‘A court has been asked to settle a dispute between a Dublin lesbian couple over the proceeds from their e470,000 [£320,000] former home.’ Those not familiar with the changes that have swept through the Irish capital over the last few years would have to wonder which feature of that arresting introduction was the more remarkable: the matter-of-fact reference to a same-sex relationship, or the impressive market value of an average house in one of the city’s outer suburbs. A house that, even more astonishingly, was worth only £265,000 a year ago, and £175,000 four years ago.

While the English market – particularly in London and the South-east – braces itself for a ‘soft landing’, Dublin is flying high, still in the grip of the kind of property fever we are recovering from on this side of the Irish Sea. A seemingly unstoppable stream of new statistics and surveys shows, inter alia, that sales activity here has dropped by a third, more than 80 per cent of respondents have now ‘lost interest’ in the property market, and, courtesy of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors last week, that the market has just had its biggest fall for eight years.

Not so over there. A browse in an estate agent near St Stephen’s Green provokes the reactions that British property window-shoppers have had to become inured to when faced with the provocative combination of distinctly ordinary dwellings, excitable estate-agent blarney and unaffordable price tags. A three-bedroom modern house with nasty stone cladding and no garden in Ballsbridge is described, for no discernible reason other than the e780k price tag, as ‘impressive’. A bog-standard chalet bungalow in Dublin 14 is apparently ‘substantial’ – the price certainly is, at e675k. A ‘residence’ in Blackrock actually looks rather ‘fine’ – but so it should be at e2 million.