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The latest report from property website Daft.ie for the March to June period shows that the selling prices of homes in Dublin have begun to fall due to recovering supply – but that asking prices were rising at a faster rate in rural areas.
Housing prices are no longer rising as fast, the report says, with the slowdown led by the five major cities – and in the month of June house and apartment selling prices in Dublin were 2.3% lower than the same month in 2025 – the first annual decline noted since 2023.
However, the study cautioned that finding for the capital may be revised when further transactions are registered for the quarter in coming weeks.
Professor Ronan Lyons, author of the report for Daft.ie said the fall in Dublin selling prices in June is “consistent with a market where supply is recovering, following the long shadow of higher interest rates, and competition between buyers is easing slightly”.
“The defining theme of the second quarter of 2026 is a broad-based slowdown in price inflation. Nationally, list-price growth has eased to 3.8%, down from 6.8% a year ago, while early transaction-price figures point to a similar cooling. But this deceleration is far from uniform ‐ it is being led, overwhelmingly, by the cities,” he noted.
“In Dublin and the other major cities, price growth has slowed sharply. List- price inflation in the capital has roughly halved over the past year, to 3.0%, while across the other cities prices are now essentially flat, at -0.2%. The clearest signal comes from transaction prices: in Dublin these have actually begun to fall, down 2.3% on a year earlier ‐ although this may be revised when further transactions are registered for the quarter in coming weeks.”
But outside the cities, the picture is very different, the report noted. “In Munster and especially Connacht-Ulster, price inflation remains strong – at 6.3% and 8.8% respectively – and little changed from a year ago. In these markets, supply remains acutely tight, and new-build activity, though growing, is not yet enough to relieve the pressure,” Prof Lyons said.
“The result is a two-speed market: cooling in the urban centres, where supply is returning, but still running hot across much of rural Ireland.”
“Every market, though, has both price and quantity signals. While the price story is one of a slowdown led by the cities, the volume story adds more nuance about the kind of supply that is driving that: the market is coming to rely more on new construction. In the year to March 2026, there were just under 58,500 transactions nationwide, up 3.2% on a year earlier. But that growth was driven entirely by newly built homes,” he added.
“Sales of new homes rose 17% over the year, to almost 14,000, and have more than doubled since the middle of the last decade. Second-hand activity, by contrast, has stalled: the number of existing homes changing hands edged down over the year and remains below its 2022 peak, before interest rates rose. The second-hand market – still by far the largest source of supply – is effectively stuck.”
“New-build completions are hugely important: the country needs to be building above 60,000 homes a year, not less than 40,000. But new-builds alone cannot restore balance to the sales market. That has to come from churn in the 1.4 million or so owner-occupied homes in existence. Until second-hand supply responds – most likely as more owners roll off the fixed-rate mortgages taken out during the rate shock of the early 2020s – overall activity will remain well below the level a well-functioning market requires,” he said.
Daft said that the average price of a three-bed semi detached nationally in the quarter was €445,000 (+3.8%), while in Dublin it was now €580,000, up 3%, and €373,000 for the rest of Leinster (+5.8%), with Munster recording ana average price of €328,000 (+6.3%) and Connacht-Ulster coming in at €262,000 (+8.8%)
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