Video PlayerClose
DUBLIN, Feb. 12 (Xinhua) -- The average home prices in Ireland went up by 2.2 percent in 2020 from 2019, according to the figures released by the country's Central Statistics Office (CSO) on Friday.
In Dublin, home prices was 1.2 percent higher than 2019 on the average while the rest of the country outside Dublin witnessed a year-on-year increase of 3.1 percent in home prices, said CSO.
While the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic had a limited impact on the Irish residential property market in 2020, its impact on the commercial property sector was very substantial, according to a report released Friday by HWBC, a Dublin-based commercial property firm.
According to the report, office rents for prime city center office space in Dublin dropped by about 10 percent from 65 euros (close to 80 U.S. dollars) per square feet in 2019 to 59 euros per square feet at the end of last year.
A total of 1.61 million square feet (about 150,000 square meters) of office space was let in Ireland in 2020, tumbling 49 percent from 2019, said the report, adding that the vacancy rate of the local office market stood at 9.5 percent at the end of last year.
The report attributed the weaker demand on the local office market mainly to the work-at-home policy adopted by many companies during the pandemic which started to hit the country at the end of February, 2020.
The report said that big technology companies played a major role in the Irish commercial property market, accounting for seven out of the ten biggest deals in 2020.
According to the report, TikTok, a video-sharing social networking platform owned by Chinese company ByteDance, is expected to expand and lease up to 500,000 square feet of office space in Dublin for its European headquarters. Enditem