Conall MacCoille

Breakfast Business with Enterprise Ireland on Newstalk.

First of all, there's a recent survey from the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission.

In that survey, only 16% of homebuyers felt that the market was transparent.

I think also one of the key things in our report today is that, like in the UK where the asking price is the asking price, and typically transactions are settled at the asking price,

What we've seen in Ireland increasingly is this premium over the asking.

So about 40% of properties sold about 10% over the asking price.

About 1 in 6, 1 in 7 sold over 20% over the asking price.

So that's not a good place to be.

If you're a home buyer, you're kind of guessing, you see the asking price, you're sort of saying to yourself, will it finally settle 10% over that number?

So if it's, say, listed for 400,000, is it going to be 450,000, maybe 500,000?

So that shows that asking prices are a poor guide to affordability for homebuyers.

It adds to the time and effort they have to spend buying a home.

And that's what we mean by this opaqueness.

And it's probably hurting liquidity.

It's a very difficult housing market.

Well, we already have the property price register, so that was a very welcome improvement in terms of transparency for the housing market.

You don't need to rely on anyone to tell you what properties are selling for in the local area.

You can check it yourself.

So I think what we're trying to argue in this report is that we have these new online bidding platforms where the entire bidding process is online.

You log in, you can see the entire bidding history.