Property Valuation Estimator

The property tax is a bit of a mess. First it was to be self-assessment but now Revenue is going to send you an estimate of their own which you can then dispute.

Ronan Lyons has come up with a nice way of estimating the value of your house based on work he’s been doing on property prices.

house-valuation

A table and some tapping of numbers is all well and good, but we know you’re lazy so we’ve whipped up a simple form to do all the calculating for you!



Obviously there’s caveats, so back to Ronan to explain them:

Clearly, this is by no means meant to capture every last factor affecting property values. (One simple extension is number of bathrooms – roughly speaking, every additional bathroom is associated with a 10% higher price.) This model captures just under two-thirds of variation in house prices in Ireland, which – given the small number of factors included – is pretty good. But there’s still a third out there to explain. (Including effects for areas within counties would explain a significant chunk of the remaining variation, as it happens.) On average this will be right, and it will for the vast majority of cases be close but of course there are always properties that have unobserved factors that dwarf what matters for most homes. The method underpinning the figures above explicitly excludes outliers, so as to better improve the estimates for the vast majority of homes.
The table above is based on 60,000 listings on Daft.ie over the year 2012, and allows for the fact that prices varied throughout the year. “Aha”, a sceptic might say, “these are only asking prices and sure we all know they are ”. As it happens, some pretty detailed research comparing asking and transaction prices shows they move together remarkably tightly, once controls for location and size are included (as they are here). Properties that sell typically sell for about 10% less than their asking price, so for that reason the starting point of €108,000 is actually 90% of the figure returned by the model. The key thing about the model is what it tells us about relativities (prices between counties), not necessarily levels.
Lastly, lest there be any confusion, I offer this table as a public service but can’t offer it as any more than what it is – one academic economist’s analysis of the market.

[A version of this post also appeared on Broadsheet.ie]

A Broadsheet New Year

It’s that time of year where you look back and see how things went.  So without further ado, here’s how Broadsheet.ie did in the last year.

The Big Numbers

Year-on-year there has been:

  • 110% increase in visits to just under 12.5 million
  • 95% increase in unique visitors to a smidgin over 3 million
  • 127% increase in pageviews to 29.1 million

Where Are Your People From?

The lion’s share of visits (72%) were from Ireland as you’d expect.  After that it drops off very quickly with the UK (10%), USA (5%), Australia (1%) and Germany (1%) rounding out the top 5.

Within Ireland, Dublin accounts for 57% of traffic and Cork 3% so we can be excused for a slight bias towards the capital.

Mucky Minds All Round

It will come as no surprise that the top three posts of the year were all mucky and not safe for work (even possibly life).

How They’re Finding Us

Apart from the usual crowd that put in some form of ‘Broadsheet’ as the search term, the top five search terms just re-enforces the idea that the readers have dirty minds with Rosanna Davison appearing twice.

  • rosanna davison
  • niamh horan
  • rosanna davison playboy
  • katie taylor
  • mario balotelli

Mario appears there because whenever he does something mad on the pitch or the news, people find the ‘Mario Balotelli: What A Legend‘ post.

The Window You Look At The Internet Through

Chrome dominates with 33% of users (up 7%), with the increase taking a chunk out of Firefox (21%) and Internet Explorer (17%).

Microsoft is slowly losing the OS battle with it slipping 4% to 61% of traffic while OS X (20%) and Linux (1.1%) both changed by under .5% each

About 16% of traffic comes from mobile devices and iOS is the big winner there accounting for 11%.

Have an Appy New Year

The much neglected iPhone App had 9,249 downloads last year.  For something that was thrown together over a couple of days Christmas two years ago, it does okay for itself.

An update is in the works at the moment which has some interesting things in it.

That’s all for now – there’ll be the usual Broadsheet birthday post later in July with more stat porn.

Previously:

Broadsheet – Entering the Terrible Twos
A year in the Broadsheet