Average monthly rental premiums increased by an average of 1.2 percent in the year to July, with the average charge for renting a three bedroom property in County Westmeath now €965, according to the latest Daft.ie Housing Market Report which was released in recent times.
The new monthly report gives key figures on the health of both rental and sales markets, with figures for the sales market showing prices on average unchanged in July compared to a year ago.
The average listed sale price nationwide in July was €259,733, while the average monthly listed rent was €1,412.
Rents in Dublin are largely unchanged, year-on-year, having risen by just 0.2 percent in the last 12 months to July.
In the rest of Leinster and in Munster, rents have risen in the last year, by 3.3 percent and 2.7 percent respectively, while in Connacht and Ulster, however, rents are 0.6 percent lower than a year ago.
In the sales segment, prices have risen in both Dublin (+1.2 percent ) and the rest of Leinster (+2.1 percent ) in the last 12 months, but have fallen elsewhere in the country. by 2.8 percent in Munster and by 2.5 percent in Connacht and Ulster.
Figures measuring the availability of property on the market show very different trends across sale and rental segments.
In the sale segment, there were just 19,538 properties for sale nationwide on August 1, down 22 percent year-on-year and the lowest August total since 2006.
In the rental market, however, availability has improved, with 41 percent more properties for rent on the August 1 than on the same date a year ago. This increase is driven by Dublin, where stock on the market is almost twice what it was a year ago, elsewhere in the country, availability is largely unchanged.
“Both sale and rental segments show very little fall-off in housing prices since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, despite the extraordinary economic contraction. Various policy supports, for both owner-occupiers and tenants, appear to have made prices sticky. Nonetheless, given the potential for successive waves of COVID-19 in Ireland, this may be tested in the coming quarters. As it stands, both sale and rental segments appear to have weathered the initial impact of the pandemic and the underlying shortage – especially of rental accommodation – remains,” Ronan Lyons, economist at Trinity College Dublin and author of the Daft Report, commented.
“Since May of this year Daft has been releasing monthly reports so that we can better analyse the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the Irish housing market. After large price drops in April the industry has, for the most part, bounced back and in this report we are even seeing price increases compared to pre-Covid-19 figures. In addition, on Monday 17th of August Daft.ie had its best day ever for traffic with over 560,000 sessions recorded. This record day goes to show that, despite the rising prices in sales and the significant increase of supply in rental, demand for properties in Ireland is as strong as ever,” Commenting on the report, Raychel O’Connell, Communications Manager at Daft.ie, asserted.
