Last week I saw a headline. "Dublin property prices down 2.3%."
It was everywhere. RTE. Every news outlet. Every property WhatsApp group in the country. And I couldn't leave it alone.
Not because I knew it was wrong. But because something didn't add up. The same week, a friend messaged me. He'd just sold his apartment in Dublin. Record price per square foot for the block. Way above asking.
Same week. Same city. Same market.
So I did what I always do. I went and found the actual data.
I pulled every property transaction in Dublin from the Property Price Register, April and May, 2025 versus 2026. Over 1,300 real sales each month. Not asking prices. Not estimates. What buyers actually paid.
The average? Yes, it fell. That's where the 2.3% is coming from.
But the median, the price right in the middle of every transaction, moved from €480,000 to €475,000. Five thousand euro. In a year. A drop of just over 1%.
And when I looked at the same streets selling in both years, prices were flat. Within 1-3% in both directions.
The MIx or the List changed. The market didn't. If you want the full breakdown of the three reasons the headline is misleading and what is really happening, I published a video on it last week. It’s on YouTube.
I've been thinking about why I did that.
Why, when everyone else read the headline and moved on, I opened a spreadsheet.
I think it's a dyslexia thing.
When reading comes harder, you learn early that the surface isn't always the whole story. You miss words. You fill in gaps. You get things wrong, and then you go back and check.
It rewires you. Not to trust the first version. To look for the one underneath.
That instinct has followed me everywhere.
In property, I've always gone to the raw data before I formed a view. In business, I question the pitch before I believe the numbers. With people, I listen to what's not being said and what they do more than what they say.
I used to think it was stubbornness. The need to verify everything.
Now I think it's just how I process the world. The surface is where most people stop. I've never been able to.
There's a debate happening in Ireland right now about fake news.
The government wants legislation. A framework to tackle misinformation. A way to stop things that aren't true from spreading.
I understand the instinct. But I think it's solving the wrong problem.
You can't ban your way to a better-informed public.
What you can do is teach people to question.
Not everything is a conspiracy. Not every headline is agenda-driven. But every piece of information has a frame around it, and the frame is chosen by someone.
A headline like "Dublin property prices down 2.3%" gets free coverage on every news outlet in the country. That's not a coincidence. That's how media ecosystems work.
The answer isn't to silence the headline. It's to know how to read behind it.
What I did this week, pulling a government register, running a median, looking at the same streets year on year, anyone can do.
It's not a special skill. It's a habit.
And it's the one they probably should have taught us in school. Banning misinformation is easier than teaching kids how to think for themselves.
That's it for this week.
If someone in your life needs to see this, share it. The newsletter is free, and so is the habit of questioning things.
See you next week.
— Shane