By Yvonne Hogan

LARGE detached family homes in the capital have halved in value in the downturn.

Estate agents admit four- and five-bedroom detached properties in Dublin are now only fetching 50pc of their 2007 prices.

The Irish Auctioneers and Valuers Institute (IAVI), which represents auctioneers around the country, says that houses nationally are now worth 40pc less than at the peak.

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.
  

IrishHomeTruths.com attempted to find out how much information was actually available on house prices sales. The following very helpful response neatly sums up the options.

FOI request for property sold prices.

Dear sir,

I refer to our telephone conversation yesterday and I hope that the following will clarify some of the issues discussed.

Regarding Freedom of Information, the position is as follows - the Property Registration Authority was established to take over the control and management of the Land Registry and Registry of Deeds.

The dispute began last Sunday when it emerged that The Irish Times had written to some estate agents expressing concern about exaggerated sales prices being submitted for publication in its property supplement. The letter - written by the property editor, Orna Mulcahy, at the end of March - described the problem of estate agent misreporting as endemic and suggested that some prices being submitted for publication were up to 20 per cent higher than the actual selling prices.
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In the UK, US, Australia and other advanced countries property sold prices are available to the general public from government agencies. In some cases you must pay a fee however the data is available for free on certain well known web sites. As an example see http://www.nethouseprices.com/index.php?con=Search-Sold-House-Prices.

A market where selling prices are transparent and readily available, recovers quicker from price corrections. This gives market participants confidence to trade and allows the market to return to normal quickly.