What did this house sell for? How to check any Irish property's sold price

A semi-detached in Lucan is sale agreed for €475,000 and you want to know whether that's strong or soft. The honest answer is sitting in a free public database — but pulling a single property out of it cleanly is harder than the marketing makes it sound. Here is how the records actually work, and how to read them like someone who has been through thousands of rows.

The Property Price Register: what it is, and what it isn't

The Residential Property Price Register is maintained by the Property Services Regulatory Authority (PSRA) under the Property Services (Regulation) Act 2011. It went live in 2012 and is backdated to cover every residential sale in the State since 1 January 2010. It is genuinely comprehensive and genuinely free — no login, no Eircode required to search, no paywall.

Each row records a defined, narrow set of facts: the date of sale (the closing date, not the date sale agreed was signed), the address as a free-text string, the county, the price, whether the property was new or second-hand, whether it was sold at full market price, and — for new builds — a flag indicating the price is VAT-exclusive or the standard VAT treatment applies. The data is built from stamp-duty returns filed with Revenue after each sale completes, which is why it updates on a rolling basis rather than in neat monthly drops.

That sourcing is the key to understanding both its strengths and its blind spots. Because every buyer pays stamp duty, coverage is close to total. But because the trigger is a Revenue filing by the buyer's solicitor during conveyancing, the timing is uneven and the detail is thin.

The limitations that actually matter

This is where casual users go wrong. The PPR is not a property database — it is a sales-transaction ledger. Treat it as one.

• Publication lag. A sale that closes in March may not surface until May, June or later, depending on when the stamp-duty return is filed. If you can't find a recent sale you know happened, it almost certainly hasn't been entered yet.
• No Eircode, historically. For most of the register's life there was no Eircode field. Addresses are free-text and wildly inconsistent — "12 The Grove", "12 The Grove, Maple Estate", and "No. 12, The Grove, Maple Est., Co. Meath" might all be the same house across different sales. Tracking one property over time is the single hardest part of the job.
• No property attributes. There are no bedrooms, no floor area, no BER, no condition. You cannot derive a price per square metre from the PPR alone — you have to source size separately and stitch it on.
• New-build VAT and bundling. A new home's price may be stated inclusive of 13.5% VAT and can fold in flooring, kitchen upgrades, or even site premiums. That makes a €450,000 new build a poor like-for-like against a €450,000 resale.
• "Not Full Market Price" rows. Sales flagged this way — part-VAT transactions, transfers between relatives, or other non-arm's-length deals — distort any average you compute. Filter them out of your comparisons.
• Thresholds and corrections. Very low figures, the odd data-entry error and later corrections all appear. A €40,000 "house" in a €400,000 estate is a clerical artefact, not a bargain.

How to search the PPR, step by step

The official site is functional rather than friendly. The reliable method:

• Start broad, by area. Set the county (and, in Dublin, narrow with the address field). Resist typing the full address first — the free-text matching is literal and will hide the row you want.
• Set a date range. Filter by year, or a custom range. To find a known sale, widen the window generously around the closing date to absorb the publication lag.
• Search by street or estate, not house number. Type "The Grove" or the estate name, then scan the results. The number is often buried or abbreviated differently than you'd expect.
• Read each row deliberately. Check the New/Second-Hand column, the Not Full Market Price flag, and the VAT indicator before you trust the figure. A clean comparable is a second-hand, full-market-price, arm's-length sale.
• Export and sort. The register lets you download results as a CSV. For any serious comparison, pull the whole street or estate into a spreadsheet and sort by date — patterns that are invisible on the website jump out instantly.

Where else sold-price data lives — and how it differs

The PPR is the system of record, but it isn't the only useful source, and the others fill its gaps in specific ways.

The crucial distinction: Daft and MyHome show asking prices in real time, but a sold figure only becomes authoritative once it lands in the PPR. An "asking €450,000" is what the vendor wants; the PPR tells you what someone actually paid — which in a cooling market can be well below, and in a hot one well above.

This stitching-together is exactly the manual work that eats an evening. Irish Home Ledger links each PPR sold price to a specific property — with its BER, comparable sales on the same street and an investment score — in one place, so you skip the spreadsheet and read the answer directly.

The hard questions buyers actually have

1. How do I identify MY specific house in messy data?

Work from the estate down, not the house up. Search the street or estate name, download every result, and line them up by date in a spreadsheet. Cross-reference against what you know: if you're tracking a 3-bed semi that you believe last sold in 2019, ignore the two-bed terraces and the 2014 rows. Where two near-identical addresses appear, the price band and the sale month are your tie-breakers — match them to the listing history on Daft or MyHome, which do carry beds and photos. If the house genuinely hasn't sold since 1 January 2010, it won't be there, and no amount of searching will conjure it.

2. How do I adjust an old sale price to today's money?

A 2018 sale tells you little about 2026 value on its own. Use the CSO Residential Property Price Index (RPPI) to bring it forward:

• Find the index value for the month the sale closed and the latest published index value (ideally for the same region and property type).
• Multiply: adjusted price = old price × (latest index ÷ sale-month index).
• Worked example: a house sold for €300,000 when the regional index read 150. The latest index is 180. Adjusted value ≈ €300,000 × (180 ÷ 150) = €360,000.

That figure is a starting point, not a valuation. It assumes the property tracked the market exactly and ignores any extension, retrofit or wear since. Treat it as the centre of a range, then adjust for the specific home.

3. How do I estimate what was paid when the exact house isn't listed?

Build a comparable. Pull the nearest sales on the same street or estate — same house type wherever possible — within the last 12–24 months. Take the median, not the average (one "Not Full Market Price" outlier wrecks an average). Then adjust for the differences you know about: a superior BER, a finished attic conversion, an extension, or a corner site all push value up; a dated interior or a north-facing rear garden pull it down. If your comparables are older than a year, time-adjust them with the RPPI first, then layer the property-specific adjustments on top.

4. How do I spot an over- or under-stated new-build price?

New-build rows are the most misread on the register. Check the VAT flag first. If the price is VAT-inclusive, the base build cost is roughly the figure divided by 1.135 — so a €454,000 listed price is about €400,000 before VAT. Then ask what the price bought: developer prices frequently bundle upgrade packs, appliances and sometimes finishings that a resale wouldn't include. A new build that looks 10–15% dearer than nearby second-hand stock is often pricing in VAT and extras, not commanding a true premium. Conversely, a suspiciously low new-build figure can be a phased-scheme early release or a part-exchange deal flagged "Not Full Market Price".

Why sold price isn't current value

A sold price is a fact about one transaction on one day between two specific parties. It tells you what was paid; it does not tell you what the house is worth now. The gap between the two opens up for predictable reasons: the market has moved since (up or down), the property has been improved or has deteriorated, the buyer overpaid in a bidding war or the vendor was a motivated seller, and conditions specific to that sale — chain pressure, a quick close, a relationship between the parties — left their mark on the figure.

Sold prices are the raw evidence. A valuation is what you build on top of that evidence: take the cleanest comparables, time-adjust them to today with the CSO index, then adjust for the subject property's size, BER, condition and aspect. Do that honestly and you'll have a defensible number to anchor an offer — or to sanity-check the one an agent has quoted you.

Frequently asked questions

Is it legal to look up what a house sold for in Ireland?

Yes. The Residential Property Price Register is a public record maintained by the PSRA under the Property Services (Regulation) Act 2011. Anyone can search it free at propertypriceregister.ie. It lists the date of sale, address, county, price and whether the sale was new or second-hand. It does not name buyers or sellers, so it doesn't breach data-protection rules.

Why can't I find my exact house on the Property Price Register?

PPR addresses are free-text and inconsistent, and historically the register held no Eircode, so a single property can be hard to isolate. Search by street or estate name rather than the full address, widen the date range back to 2010, and find the row whose price and month match the sale you know about. If the house hasn't changed hands since 1 January 2010, it won't appear at all.

How long does it take for a sale to appear on the PPR?

Entries are driven by stamp-duty returns filed with Revenue after closing, so there's a lag of roughly a few weeks to several months. A sale that closed in spring may not show until summer. If a recent sale is missing, it has most likely not yet been filed rather than been omitted.

Does the PPR price for a new build include VAT?

It can. New homes are flagged as new, and the price may be stated inclusive of 13.5% VAT and can bundle in upgrades, appliances or site costs. That inflates the figure versus a comparable second-hand home, so strip out VAT — divide by 1.135 — before comparing a new-build price to resale evidence.

How do I adjust an old sold price to today's value?

Use the CSO Residential Property Price Index. Find the index for the month the sale closed and the latest published month, then multiply the old price by (latest index ÷ sale-month index). A €300,000 sale when the index read 150, with the index now at 180, time-adjusts to about €360,000 — before any allowance for the specific property's condition or improvements.

Sources & further reading

1. Property Services Regulatory Authority — Residential Property Price Register: propertypriceregister.ie
2. Revenue — Stamp Duty and Help to Buy (HTB): revenue.ie
3. Central Statistics Office — Residential Property Price Index (RPPI): cso.ie
4. Daft.ie — property listings and sold/price register: daft.ie
5. MyHome.ie — property listings and price register: myhome.ie
6. Citizens Information — Buying a home and the conveyancing process: citizensinformation.ie

This article is general information, not financial, legal or valuation advice. Figures and schemes are correct to the best of our knowledge as of June 2026; always verify with the official source before acting.