Rise in Cork house prices is above average

Cork house prices increased more than the national average last year, as homes cost an average of €361,500 in Cork city and €361,143 in Cork county, a new report from Daft.ie shows.

According to the Irish House Price Report Q4 2025, prices in Cork city are up 7.4% year on year for a semi-detached three bed home, and 5.7% in Cork county. According to the Daft.ie List Price Index, housing prices nationally were 5.5% higher than a year ago.

In Cork city, prices rose last year compared to the year before for every property type, including increasing 7.4% to €409,000 for a semi-detached three bed and 4% to €493 for a semi-detached four bed.

Rises of 4.4%, 2.5%, 0.3% and 12.8% were seen for detached two, three, four and five beds respectively, bringing their prices to an average of €301,000, €419,000, €607,000 and €782,000.

For terraced homes, a two bed cost €274,00, up 3% from last year, a three bed was €331,000, up 8.2% and a four bed was €383,000, up 2.3%.

One bed apartments saw the sharpest price increase in Cork city, up 16.1% to €271,000, while two and three bed apartments were up 5.5% to €302,000 and 8.3% to €346,000, respectively.

Cork county saw increases compared to last year in every property type aside from one and two bed apartments, though the price for 3 bed apartments was up 13% to €276,000 compared to 2024, the highest increase per property type.

A rise of 12.9% was also recorded for terraced two bed houses, while the lowest increase was 4.5% for a detached five bed house, which was the most expensive property type at an average price of €566,000.

The report says that nationally, there has been a modest decline in the speed of increases compared to last year, but “the market remains very tight”.

GAP

The gap between the initial list price and the ultimate transaction price is close to a record high, at over 6% across Ireland, and the volume of second-hand homes put up for sale over the course of the year was just over 53,000, down compared 63,000 in early 2023 and 10% compared to the pre-covid levels.

The report authors explained: “A fall-off in supply of about 10% is one thing. But trends in availability on the market ‐ which reflects both supply and demand ‐ are worse. There were only 11,500 second-hand homes available to buy on December 1.

“While that's up 7% year-on-year, it is less than half the pre-covid average of over 26,000. And Dublin partially offsets this, as its supply picture is rosier than elsewhere.” 

On December 1 2025, there were a total of 876 second-hand homes actively for sale across Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford cities, which is up 2% on the same date a year ago, but a considerable decrease from over 2,000 before the pandemic. Transaction prices across the four cities are now 49% above their pre-covid levels and 87% higher than a decade ago.

There were almost 1,200 market transactions in the four major cities (excluding Dublin) in the third quarter of 2025 – a fall of 1% on the same quarter a year earlier, and there were very few transactions of newly-built homes in the third quarter, just 19 compared to almost 50 a year before.