Details of house prices are now online for free
AN Ulsterman is attempting to make buying and selling houses more transparent by publishing the prices houses are actually sold for.
Unlike England and Wales, where the price that a house last sold for is freely available on the internet for prospective buyers, in Northern Ireland there is no free information on what a house cost the last time it was sold.
However, Coleraine man Paul Gilpin has set up a free website which publishes the prices at which houses currently sell for at auction.
Since February, he has travelled to property auctions across the Province to record the prices that people are prepared to pay for houses, something he believes is an invaluable "live" indicator of where the property market stands.
After each auction, the 37-year-old IT professional publishes the opening bid level, sales prices and outcomes on his Northern Ireland Property Auctions website where anyone can check the auction results for free.
"I lived in London for 15 years and it was possible to search property sales prices online by address and postcode for free," he said.
"I'm a first-time buyer and when I'm placing a realistic offer on a house, it helps to know what the owner paid for it in the first place.
"We can currently only find out what houses were bought and sold for in Northern Ireland by physically going to the Land Registry in Belfast and paying a minimum fee of 3 for each property searched.
"I just don't see why, in the current information age, this information isn't available freely online."
In England and Wales, private websites take the Land Registry data and publish it for free, with advertisements covering the cost of the websites.
The News Letter understands that Land and Property Services, which is responsible for registering property ownership in Northern Ireland, is looking into making house prices available on its website for a small fee.
Mr Gilpin said that the data on his website showed that lots are coming up "time and time again" at auction, but not selling, purely because vendors are unwilling to drop their reserve price.
There are now 11 auction reports on Mr Gilpin's property auction website, covering about 500 transactions, and he said that he expected it to continue expanding with the expected increase of property lots coming to auction as a result of repossessions.
The Northern Ireland Property Auctions site is online at http://nipropertyauctions.google pages.com
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Tuesday 29 May 2012
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