How Irish house valuations actually work

Ask three estate agents to value the same house and you’ll often get three different numbers. That’s not because valuation is guesswork — it’s because a home’s value is an estimate of what a willing buyer would pay, and reasonable people can read the evidence slightly differently. This guide explains how a credible estimate is actually built, what moves the number, and how to read one sensibly.

Comparable sold prices are the foundation

The single most reliable signal of what a home is worth is what similar homes nearby have actually sold for. Not asking prices — those are negotiating positions and aspirations. Sold prices are facts. In Ireland, the Residential Property Price Register records the sale price of every residential property sold since 2010, and that public dataset is the bedrock of any honest estimate.

A good estimate gathers the most relevant recent sales near your home, then asks: what did homes like this, in this area, recently change hands for? The closer the comparables are to your property — same town or estate, same property type, similar size — the more trustworthy the answer.

How comparables are chosen and cleaned

Raw sales data is noisy, so it needs filtering before it can be used. A robust process narrows the pool and removes distortions:

• Location first: start with sales in your town or estate, widening to the county only if there aren’t enough local sales to be reliable.
• Like-for-like: match your property type (house vs apartment) and lean towards similar sizes and bedroom counts.
• Recency: weight recent sales more heavily, because the market moves over time.
• Outlier removal: strip out freakish sales — a derelict shell, a transfer between family members, or a one-off luxury result — that would otherwise drag the estimate.

A catch unique to new builds: VAT

New homes are recorded on the Price Register exclusive of VAT (currently 13.5%), so the published figure is lower than what the buyer actually paid. A new build listed at €321,586 really cost about €365,000. If you compare a new build against second-hand sales without adjusting for this, you’ll undervalue it — so any sensible estimate grosses these prices up first.

Why we show a range, not a single figure

No automated model can know the exact condition, finish, or buyer demand for one specific home. A single number looks confident but is quietly misleading. A range is more honest: it reflects the genuine spread of comparable evidence and the real uncertainty around your property. The width of the range — and the confidence level attached to it — tells you how much evidence there is to lean on.

What moves the estimate

Location does most of the heavy lifting, followed by property type and size. After that, several factors nudge the figure up or down:

• Bedrooms and floor area — more usable space generally means a higher value.
• BER rating — energy efficiency increasingly affects what buyers will pay.
• Condition — a refurbished home commands more than one that needs work.
• Parking and a garden — modest but real premiums in most areas.

Being specific helps the estimate help you. Naming your estate or road lets it use your immediate neighbours’ sales rather than a whole-town average, which can be the difference between a vague figure and a genuinely useful one.

What an estimate is — and is not

Think of an estimate as a well-informed starting point: a fast, independent, evidence-based view to anchor your thinking before you talk to agents or set an asking price. It is not a professional valuation, a bank valuation, or a surveyor’s report. For a mortgage or a sale you’ll still need a qualified valuer who can inspect the property in person.

Try it on your own home

Our free estimate runs exactly this process — local comparables, like-for-like matching, outlier removal, VAT adjustment — and shows you the range, the confidence level, and how many sales it used, in under a minute.