More homes are for sale – but not because more are coming onto the market

Ronan Lyons

The Housing Essay is a new recurring deep dive from a rotating variety of voices into issues impacting the property crisis in Ireland. Are there potential solutions that may be currently overlooked or traditionally ignored by policymakers? Today, housing and economics expert Ronan Lyons looks at a key data point.

13,775 – The number of second-hand homes for sale nationwide on 1 September

The number of homes available to buy at any one time is a good way of gauging conditions on the property market. Too few homes means there is more demand than supply and prices are likely to be pushed up further; too many homes and supply exceeds demand, and prices fall.

Where are we now?

On 1 September, there were 13,775 second-hand homes for sale nationwide, according to the latest Daft.ie Sales Report. That is 12.5% more than on the same date a year earlier, and the highest figure for any September since 2022. The market is less tight than it was a year ago.

In part this reflects a dip last year. Last September, the stock of homes for sale dipped unusually sharply. That flatters this year’s comparison. Through the summer months, the annual increase was running at a more modest 6-8%. But the direction is the same: in every month of 2026 so far, there have been more homes available to buy than a year earlier.

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Nonetheless, it is worth keeping the increase in perspective. Between 2015 and 2019, there were typically over 26,000 second-hand homes on the market at any one time – almost twice today’s figure. In the aftermath of the crash, in 2009 and 2010, there were over 60,000. The low point of recent years came as recently as February 2025, when there were just over 9,300 homes for sale in the entire country. Buyers today have more choice than a year or two ago, but far less than a decade ago.

Is supply recovering?

It would be natural to read this and conclude that supply is finally recovering. But the number of homes for sale at any one time is a bit like the water level in a bath. It depends not only on how fast water comes in through the tap, but also on how fast it drains out.

Over the full 12 months to the end of August, just under 52,700 second-hand homes were listed for sale on Daft.ie. That is essentially the same number as in each of the previous two years – and over 10% below the average between 2015 and 2019 of almost 60,000.

The tap of homes coming onto the market has not picked up at all. What has changed is the drain.

The number of listings leaving the market, whether sold or withdrawn, fell by 3% over the year, to about 51,100. With the same number of homes coming on and fewer going off, homes are staying on the market for longer, and the stock builds up.

One way to capture this is to ask how long it would take to clear all the homes for sale, at the current rate at which listings leave the market. On 1 September, the answer was about 3.2 months, up from 2.8 months a year earlier. Before the pandemic, it would have taken closer to five months.

That is the signature of softer demand, rather than a surge in supply – and it fits with the other signals in the Daft Report. Early figures suggest transaction prices rose by just 0.8% in the year to September, the slowest rate since 2020. In Dublin, they are lower than a year ago, although again this is based on transactions registered by late September.

The picture around the country

And the typical home now sells for 2.6% above its initial list price, down from 6.8% a year ago. Registered sales of second-hand homes in the year to June were down 1%, while sales of newly built homes rose by 13%, suggesting that at least some buyers have switched from second-hand homes to new ones.

The picture varies considerably around the country. Dublin is the stand-out: there were 3,802 second-hand homes for sale in the capital on 1 September, up 16% on a year earlier and now within 8% of the pre-pandemic average. It is the only region close to that benchmark – although Dublin’s market was the tightest in the late 2010s, so the benchmark itself may not be fair.

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In the four other cities, stock is up 27%, but remains around a third below pre-pandemic levels. And outside the cities, the increases have been small and supply remains very tight.

In Munster, outside the cities, stock is up just 4% and is still 64% below its 2015-2019 average, while in Connacht-Ulster, it is up 2% and around 60% below.

What does this mean for buyers and sellers?

For buyers, particularly in Dublin, the balance of power has shifted a little. More choice, and homes lingering for longer, mean less need to bid well over the list price and more room to negotiate. For sellers, the message is that the asking price matters again: a home listed too high is now more likely to sit there for longer than to spark a bidding war.

But this is a market easing off from extraordinary pressure, not one awash with homes. For stock to return to anything like normal levels will take more than slower sales, it will need the tap of homes coming on to the market to open further. That means more homeowners putting their homes on the market, whether trading down, trading up or moving on. But rising interest rates may have the exact opposite effect, if borrowers lock in lower rates and fix into the early 2030s.

Until we see more homes coming on to the market, a rising number of homes for sale is less a sign that the shortage is ending than a sign that buyers have become a little more cautious.

Ronan Lyons is a professor in Economics in Trinity College Dublin and one of Ireland’s leading analysts of the housing with a particular focus on how local outcomes (such as population or housing prices) are affected by bigger factors (such as trade policy).

• Journal Media Ltd has shareholders in common with Daft Media Ltd.