Waterford housing prices nearly 40% higher than pre-covid

Housing prices across Waterford have risen significantly since their pre-pandemic levels, as housing prices nationally are the highest in nearly 10 years. This price inflation comes as the number of second-hand homes on sale has dropped to the lowest since the data was first collected. 

Prices across Munster rose by 9% in 2024, after rising by 7.1% in 2023 and 5.2% in 2022, the latest Daft.ie housing prices report shows.

Supply in Munster has dropped by a significant 17% when compared with December 2023, with just 2,900 second-hand homes for sale in Munster on December 1, just one-third of the average during the period of 2015-2019.

In Waterford County, the average home price has risen to €316,670, a year-on-year increase of 7.8%. This amounts to a 38.8% rise since before the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Waterford City has a significantly lower average home price of just €247,236, which represents a 2% increase since the third financial quarter of the year. Since this time last year, however, there has been inflation of 6.3% and an increase in price of 36.2% since before the pandemic.

What does this mean for the housing market?

"If the goal of policymakers is to ensure stable housing prices, then, this has been the least successful year for policymakers since 2017, when prices rose by roughly the same proportion," said Ronan Lyons, the author of the Daft.ie Report, "Indeed, the only year of the last 15 with higher inflation than 2024 is 2014, when the Dublin market rebounded so sharply that the Central Bank introduced its mortgage market rules."

The Trinity College Dublin economist posed the question of why higher rates of inflation are still occurring despite the "effective doubling" of the number of homes being built in the past five years.

"There are three elements in the answer to that apparent puzzle. The first is that supply alone is only part of the story – if demand grows by 5% a year, then growth in supply of 2% rather than 1% will not be enough. And growth in demand is probably close to something like five per cent: incomes are growing by 3-4% a year – and demand for housing goes up as incomes go up – and that interacts with demographic growth of perhaps 1%," he said.

What does the market need now?

"With very strong growth in demand, the country needs very strong growth in supply. And while completions of new homes have doubled in the last five years, it’s important to remember that the overall addition to the stock of housing is quite small: a country with roughly two million homes is adding about 1.5% to that stock a year, instead of adding just 0.75%."

While the number of privately built homes is also rising, Lyons said that they are not entering the housing market at the rates that could be expected, leading to the "growth in demand has been stronger than growth in new supply."