Ireland’s housing market is showing signs that the period of “acute overheating” of prices that followed the Covid-19 pandemic is coming to an end, Daft.ie said on Thursday.

Still, prices in urban areas are cooling at a faster pace than outside the cities amid continuing supply challenges.

In its latest housing market report, covering the first three months of 2026, the property website said listed home prices increased by 0.6 per cent between December and March.

It means the listed home prices have increased by 3.7 per cent over the past 12 months, the “slowest rate of increase since late 2023″, Daft said.

Similarly, early indications suggest transaction prices nationally were “stable” between December and March, Daft said, bringing the annual rate of increase to 5.6 per cent, “again the slowest rate of increase since late 2023”.

At the end of last year, the average price nationwide for a three-bed, semidetached home in the State was €435,000.

Ronan Lyons, professor of economics at Trinity College Dublin and author of the Daft report, said the slowing of the rate of increase across listed and transaction prices is “the clearest sign yet of a market moving away from the acute overheating seen since the pandemic”.

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However, he said the cooling is not “uniform” across the nation. “Instead, a more nuanced pattern is emerging, with signs of stabilisation appearing first in urban markets.”

In Dublin, for example, listed house prices increased by an average of 2.5 per cent in the year to March, less than half the 6.3 per cent rate observed in the 12 months to March 2025, according to the report. This was also the softest rate of increase observed since the middle of 2023, Daft said.

Early figures suggest transaction prices fell by 1.1 per cent in the first quarter, the report also reveals, which would represent the second consecutive quarter of decline.

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A similar pattern is evident across the other big urban areas, with average prices in the four major cities unchanged between December and March, according to Daft’s analysis, and up only 0.7 per cent in the past 12 months.

Outside the cities, the cooling is less pronounced.

In Connacht and Ulster, excluding the Galway urban area, listed prices increased by 8.2 per cent over 12 months to March, largely in line with the first quarters of 2025 and 2024.

Lyons said the “divergence” between urban and rural areas is being driven by the type of homes that are being sold.

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In Dublin and the other cities, second-hand homes are the “dominant” source of housing, and the availability of these units has improved significantly over the past 12 months, rising 14 per cent, he said.

Excluding urban areas, “supply constraints remain far more binding”, Lyons said, “particularly in regions where second-hand availability is still a fraction of pre-pandemic levels”.

While some of the pressure is being alleviated by increased delivery of new homes, “in much of the country, where new supply remains limited and second-hand activity subdued, price inflation continues to run at a higher rate”.

The result, Lyons said, is a housing market “adjusting unevenly to changing supply conditions”.

New housing starts fell by more than three-quarters last year, with activity slowing by almost 84 per cent in the key local authority areas of Fingal County Council and South Dublin County Council, according to a report published by Ireland’s pillar banks earlier this month.