How to know it is a good area when purchasing a property in Ireland?

One of the common questions when purchasing a property is the area, which might be an important factor to make a final decision on top of the price and condition of a property. In this post, I will briefly introduce the Pobal HP Deprivation Index, which could provide a good overview of different aspects regarding an area of your interests. Although things can change and the people living in that area can change as well as time goes, this at least gives a good reference with public data collected in a certain year.

What is Pobal HP Deprivation Index?

The Pobal HP Deprivation Index is a series of maps measuring the relative affluence or disadvantage of a particular geographical area in the Republic of Ireland, using data compiled from various censuses. 

How to know whether it is a good area when purchasing a property in Ireland using the Pobal HP Deprivation Index?

The website (click the hyperlink) provides a great visualization about the index using different datasets from various years. 

You can zoom in to an area of your interests and click the button highlighted in red below on the right top area of the page, which allows you to select one of the data sources. 

For instance, the updated screenshot below shows the results when we choose the "2016-By Small Area" data source for our visualization. You can choose different data sources and have a look based on those sources.

The colors represent the degree of affluence in that small area, e.g., the orange color indicates "extremely disadvantaged" while the dark blue indicates "extremely affluent".

You could also click a specific small area to delve into details about that area. For example, the figure below shows some useful statistics about the chosen area such as:

• Total population
• 3rd level education percentage
• Local authority rented/Social housing percentage 
• Unemployment rate (%)
• ...
• ...

As you might expect, normally speaking, the property/housing price tends to be higher in those affluent areas when you look at prices listed on Daft.ie compared to less affluent ones.

It would be even better if there is data about recent years, but the most recent year seems to be 2016. So there might be some changes of the areas during the past years as well. Leave a comment or share the post in case it is helpful!