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.
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