Countries · Ireland
What to check in Ireland before you sign.
The costliest defect appears in no listing: an extension without permission. It makes the house hard to sell and hard to mortgage, and the much-quoted seven-year rule does not cure it.
What costs the most money in Ireland
An extension over the 40 square metre exemption limit, or one breaching height, boundary or window rules, is an unauthorised development. After seven years the authority can no longer enforce, but the work does NOT become legal: it remains without permission, and buyers and lenders still ask for a Certificate of Compliance from an engineer or surveyor. A seller who conceals this before contracts can see the sale unwound.
Purchase costs
1 to 6% stamp duty plus solicitor and fees
of the purchase price, on top of the price in the listing.
- Stamp duty, banded by purchase price1, 2 oder 6 %
- Stamp duty on buying ten houses or more15 %
- Solicitor for the conveyancingkein gesetzlicher Satz
- VAT on the fee, Land Registry charge and searcheskommen dazu
Source: Stamp duty at the Revenue rates for instruments executed on or after 2 October 2024: 1 percent up to €1 million, 2 percent up to €1.5 million, 6 percent above that. Anyone acquiring ten houses or more within twelve months pays 15 percent; the 6 percent does not apply to three or more apartments in the same building. For the remaining items Citizens Information deliberately names no amounts, and that is the real point here: there is no statutory rate for solicitors' fees, some charge a flat fee and some a percentage of the price, and VAT comes on top. Shopping around is worth more here than in countries with a fee schedule. The predictable tax burden, at one percent, is far lower than in Germany or Austria.
The trap for tenants
The rental authority itself found 3,000 cases where the rent may breach the ceiling of a Rent Pressure Zone. They were not found through complaints but by matching data at the level of the individual home. Anyone assuming an unlawful increase comes to light on its own is wrong: it comes to light only when someone does the arithmetic. On top of that, 6,027 notices were issued this year alone because landlords had never registered the tenancy at all, 2,670 of them in the third quarter.
Energy and the duty to renovate
The Building Energy Rating (BER, A1 to G) is mandatory for sale and letting, and stricter than elsewhere: the rating must appear in EVERY advertisement, and the buyer must receive the BER together with the Advisory Report before closing. Every certificate is publicly verifiable in the SEAI's BER register. A breach is a criminal offence carrying a fine of up to €5,000 per instance. There is no letting ban above a given rating.
Source: European Union (Energy Performance of Buildings) Regulations 2012 (S.I. No. 243 of 2012)
Certificate validity: 10 years
What to watch for in Ireland in particular
The price in the listing here is not the end of the negotiation but its beginning: the median sale price in the first quarter of 2026 was seven per cent above the original asking price. This is not an outlier from a hot quarter but the result of a persistently tight supply. Nationwide, 11,800 properties were for sale at the end of the quarter, and the median property was off the market after just over a month. The median asking price was 385,000 euros nationwide and 450,000 euros in Dublin. Anyone who bases their budget on the listing is therefore using the wrong figure.
Official maps in Ireland
3 map layers lie directly over your property.
Not as an average for the district, but at your exact address, with a legend and a visible source. Every layer can be switched on separately.
Check it yourself
The official bodies in Ireland.
Scan my Home checks against these sources. You can call up every one of them yourself, and that is exactly the point: a figure you cannot verify is not a figure, it is a claim.
Ownership & charges
Owner, charges, boundaries
Market & transactions
Residential Property Price Register
Sale prices actually achieved
Energy
BER Building Energy Rating (SEAI)
Registered energy rating
Building & zoning
MyPlan.ie / Local Development Plan
Zoning, planned schemes
The market in Ireland
63,440 dwelling purchases were filed with the tax authority in 2025, worth €26.9 billion. One in five did not go to a household: companies, funds and public bodies bought 12,857 dwellings for €5.1 billion, 20.3 percent of the market. As a private buyer you are often bidding against someone who decides faster and needs no mortgage.
Source: Central Statistics Office, Residential Property Transactions by Non-Households 2025
A real dossier from this country
See what the analysis found on an actual listing in Ireland — every figure with its source.
Open the example dossierOther countries