Average over-asking by Eircode: where Irish buyers paid most over list in 2026
How much over asking will you have to pay? Every Irish buyer asks it; everyone gets a different anecdote in response. Daft posts the medians but doesn't separate active asking from sold; the Property Price Register has the sold price but not the original asking price; nobody publicly bridges the two.
We did. 26,535 PPR sales from the last 24 months, each matched to the original listing's asking price via address + Eircode + property-cluster de-duplication. Below: the national breakdown, the 20 hottest routing keys (where buyers paid most over list), and the 10 coolest (where they didn't).
National baseline
Two thirds of Irish property sales close above the asking price — but the average premium is just +6.0% nationally. The headline "bidding wars everywhere" narrative is real but smaller in magnitude than coverage suggests. Crucially, 23% of sales close below asking — there are entire regions of the country where asking prices are aspirational opening positions, not floors.
The 20 hottest routing keys
Three patterns:
1. The Kildare commuter belt dominates the top 10. W23 (Maynooth/Leixlip), W91 (Naas/Sallins), W12 (Newbridge), R51 (Athy), R45 (Tullamore) — all in the top 10 with +8.3% to +10.1% average premium. This is the Dublin overflow market. Buyers priced out of Dublin city-centre arrive with Dublin budgets and meet smaller-town supply, pushing prices up.
2. Sligo, Leitrim, Cavan, Monaghan: north-west tier is genuinely hot. F91 (Sligo), A75 (Carrickmacross), A82 (Cavan/Kells), H18 (Monaghan town), N41 (Carrick-on-Shannon). Average premium 7.6% to 12.5%. Driven by remote-work in-migration + investor activity at lower price points where cash buyers compete most aggressively.
3. The "regional city" tier is consistently hot. V94 Limerick (+8.8%, 797 sales — the highest-volume hot area on the list), V92 Killarney/Tralee (+7.3%), N91 Mullingar (+6.2%), E45 Clonmel (+8.2%). Mid-tier Irish cities consistently see strong bidding because their supply pipelines haven't scaled with population.
The 10 coolest routing keys
The counter-narrative to the bidding-war story. In Y21 Wexford town, average closing price is below asking — buyers there have leverage, not sellers. In Dublin 7 (D07), Dublin 24 (Tallaght), Cork City South (T12), Howth (D13), Dun Laoghaire (K67), buyers paid essentially exactly at asking — the high-listings-supply Dublin postcodes and Cork city.
Three notes on the coolest list:
1. Wexford (Y21) is the only routing key averaging below asking. Asking prices in Wexford town have run ahead of the closing-price reality — sellers list optimistically, buyers negotiate the difference back.
2. Dublin metropolitan postcodes cluster cool. D07, D24, D13, K67, D15, K36 all average under 1% premium. This is what high supply looks like. Dublin has more active listings per capita than the regions, and buyers are more sophisticated about not chasing.
3. The "premium areas" you'd expect to be hottest (Foxrock, Greystones) are not on the cool list — but they're also not in the top 20. Premium areas sit in the middle of the distribution: high prices, but buyer/seller bargaining tends to converge close to the asking price.
Methodology
- Matching: Every listing on Daft / MyHome with a sold flag is matched against the Property Price Register via a multi-stage fuzzy join — exact Eircode first (~95% confidence), then street + house number + county fuzzy match (Jaro-Winkler ≥ 0.85). We retain matches with confidence ≥ 0.8.
- Period: PPR sales between Q3 2024 and Q2 2026 inclusive — 24-month window. PPR has a 2-3 month publication lag so the latest end of the window is incomplete.
- Outlier handling: We exclude matched pairs where the price gap exceeds ±50% — those are almost always mismatches (different property at a similar address) or PPR quirks (multiple-unit sales recorded as one).
- Routing-key threshold: Only routing keys with ≥50 matched sales in the period are included in the chart. Below that the average becomes too noisy.
Full table — top 20 hottest with detail
| # | Routing key | County | Matched sales | Avg premium | Median premium | % over asking |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | F91 Sligo + Leitrim border | Sligo | 560 | +12.51% | +11.98% | 80.7% |
| 2 | R45 Tullamore | Offaly | 130 | +10.14% | +9.54% | 85.4% |
| 3 | R51 Athy | Kildare | 102 | +9.38% | +6.13% | 82.4% |
| 4 | A75 Carrickmacross | Monaghan | 69 | +9.07% | +6.00% | 68.1% |
| 5 | P51 Tramore | Waterford | 51 | +8.94% | +5.88% | 64.7% |
| 6 | V94 Limerick City | Limerick | 797 | +8.83% | +7.07% | 77.3% |
| 7 | W12 Newbridge | Kildare | 139 | +8.53% | +6.36% | 74.8% |
| 8 | W23 Maynooth / Leixlip | Kildare | 234 | +8.41% | +7.53% | 82.5% |
| 9 | W91 Naas / Sallins | Kildare | 267 | +8.35% | +7.21% | 82.0% |
| 10 | E45 Clonmel | Tipperary | 170 | +8.15% | +4.78% | 75.3% |
| 11 | F26 Tubbercurry | Sligo | 58 | +8.04% | +6.60% | 70.7% |
| 12 | A82 Kells | Meath | 81 | +7.88% | +7.19% | 79.0% |
| 13 | X35 Dungarvan | Waterford | 105 | +7.88% | +4.88% | 77.1% |
| 14 | A82 Cavan town | Cavan | 160 | +7.67% | +3.90% | 60.6% |
| 15 | H18 Monaghan town | Monaghan | 153 | +7.64% | +6.38% | 79.1% |
| 16 | V92 Killarney / Tralee | Kerry | 383 | +7.34% | +6.67% | 68.9% |
| 17 | N41 Carrick-on-Shannon | Leitrim | 303 | +7.05% | +6.04% | 70.3% |
| 18 | E91 Thurles | Tipperary | 196 | +6.59% | +4.74% | 69.9% |
| 19 | C15 Navan / Trim | Meath | 274 | +6.18% | +5.95% | 74.5% |
| 20 | N91 Mullingar | Westmeath | 623 | +6.16% | +5.13% | 73.8% |
What to do with this if you're buying
- Find your candidate area in the table. If it's top-10 hot, expect to need at least +8% over asking in your mental budget; the median sale closed at that premium or higher.
- If it's on the cool list, opening at asking is reasonable; opening at -5% is defensible. Don't auto-bid above asking just because the headlines say bidding wars are universal.
- For any specific property: paste the address into BuyerIQ for an offer-range estimate calibrated to that property, its comparables, and the live market temperature for the immediate area. The routing-key average is a screening input; per-property is the validation step.
Related reads on the same dataset: ghost-bidding rates by area and areas where asking prices outpaced sale prices.