House price inflation reached the highest level in eight years across Ireland in the last year, with a 3.7 per cent rise during the first three months of 2025, prompting calls for the government to take urgent action to tackle missed house building targets.
The latest report from Daft.ie shows typical listed house prices reached just over €346,000 on March 1st – 11.6 per cent higher than a year ago, and up 35 per cent since the beginning of the Covid19 pandemic in 2020.
The number of second-hand homes available at the beginning of March was fewer than 9,300, a 17 per cent reduction year-on-year. The Daft report said that one reason for the aggravated house price inflation was the substantial decline in the number of second-hand homes available available for purchase.
“The current rate of inflation in the market is the second-highest seen in the 10 years since mortgage market rules were introduced, exceeded only by the spike in prices seen in early 2017,” the property website said, publishing its latest Daft.ie House Price Report on Tuesday.
“As before, the sharp increases in prices around the country are happening at a time of very tight supply,” it added.
Inflation is higher than the national average in Dublin and Leinster – at 12.2 per cent and 13.4 per cent respectively – while it has also surged by 13.2 per cent in Galway and 13.8 per cent in Limerick, and at rates of 11.2 per cent and 9.2 per cent in Waterford and Cork cities respectively.
The house price rise was described as “as a result of government failure” by Independent TD Mattie McGrath, who said that people seeking to buy homes were feeling “helpless” and “desperate” and in “fear for the future”.
“Its more bad news for ordinary families who are increasingly feeling helpless and desperate,” he said. “The government are sitting on their hands while people are emigrating due to the housing crisis, and they are failing to provide for one of the most basic need of their citizens, somewhere to live.”
Trinity College Dublin economist and report author Ronan Lyons said with prices increasing at a faster rate than almost any other time since mortgage market rules were introduced a decade ago, the lack of second-hand supply is a clear problem.
“Even as transactions of newly-built homes increase, the second-hand market is at its tightest in [this report] series going back almost two decades,” he said.
He said the continuing housing deficit remained the primary issue driving the inflation surge – noting that Since 2012, house prices have grown in nominal terms by 126 per cent.
“The mortgage market rules were introduced a decade ago to prevent a repeat of the loose lending that drove Ireland’s Celtic Tiger bubble and crash,” he said. “Nonetheless, prices are up 75 per cent since then, not because of too much credit but because of too few homes.”
Last year, the government fell far short of its own housing target – with just 30,330 new homes built last year – almost 10,000 units less than what the government promised voters during the November election campaign would be completed in that time.
In the past week, the Central Bank and the Banking and Payments Federation of Ireland said that it estimated 35,000 new homes being completed in 2025, also far short of the 41,000 government target for 2025.
Central Bank of Ireland governor Gabriel Makhlouf suggested planning was the “number one” challenge in regard to housing, and queried whether the government needed to examine if its many policies and interventions in the housing market were “mutually supportive” before introducing new ones.
“My very strong advice to Government is that there are many interventions that they have already made, and are making, in the housing market, and my advice would be to take stock of all of those interventions, make sure they’re all mutually supportive of each other before introducing new ones,” he said.
Mattie McGrath agreed that planning was a major issue, saying that it was holding up building homes right across the country, and that rural families were being denied the right to build a home on family land even as housing prices continued to surge.
However, Minister for Housing, James Browne, said that a “collapse” in apartment building in Dublin was a key issue in delivery, but that “housing outside of Dublin, generally speaking, is moving along, relatively speaking, on target.”