The ESRI/Permanent TSB house price index became the benchmark during the boom years. It is produced by the government agency the ESRI and the non government mortgage lenders, Permanent TSB.

Resources used for preparing this report are valuation estimations by industry insiders. It is not based on any solid data such as actual sale price. The valuations are done by agents of Permanent TSB.

This report is flawed for the following reasons.

• The data is based on estimates of a properties worth. Real data is not used.
• There is scope for data bias if the person providing the estimate has an interest in seeing prices rise or fall.
• Since the data are estimates, the acuracy is dependent upon the skill of the supplier of the estimates.
• Due to the lack of sales in Ireland's housing market we assume the sample set used to calculate the statistics has reduced to a level where statisticians would consider the data unreliable.
• The report does not provide a count of transactions so it's accuracy cannot be measured.
• Since the report is based on predicting prices, the accuracy decreases as markets become more volatile and less predictable. The Irish property market is currently crashing.
• No median price is provided just an average. This means properties that deviate heavily from the mean will skew the results.