Galway house prices up €105k in five years

The median cost to buyers in the city and county rose by €105,000 since 2019, to a current value of €355,000.

Underlining that is the revelation in the latest REA Average House Price Index which shows that properties prices in western counties increased at twice the rate of the east coast.

Three-bedroom semi-detached homes in counties Clare, Donegal, Galway, Limerick, Mayo, Roscommon and Sligo increased by over €10,000 over the last three months alone – with an average annual rise of 16 per cent.

This is twice the rate of increase in commuter counties, which rose by seven and a half per cent.

Galway’s first-time home buyers have also endured the biggest increases in the country in terms of mortgage loan amounts and prices paid in the twelve months up to June this year.

And people in Galway are waiting longer than elsewhere to take the plunge into the property market, according to the latest Mortgage Market Profile Report from the Banking and Payments Federation Ireland (BPFI).

It shows that house prices have risen substantially throughout the country in the five years ending in June 2024 – increasing in Galway by 42% in that period.

The authors say that two factors have played a part in driving median property values higher, a general increase in property values and a notable shift towards new properties, which are built to more modern standards than the existing properties, such as A-grade BERs (Building Energy Ratings) and usually command a relatively higher price.

Higher Galway home prices are reflected in the fact that in the five years since June 2019, the proportion of mortgages taken out by first-time home buyers of existing (or second hand) properties under €300,000 fell from 54% of the total number of mortgages down to less than 31%.

Meanwhile, new houses costing more than €300,000 accounted for 38% of first-time buyer mortgages in the first half of this year, compared with 14% during the first half of 2019.

The section of the BPFI report dealing with Galway reveals that the median age of first-time buyer (FTB) borrowers buying an existing property in the city and county was 37, making them the oldest such borrowers in the country.