PSRA compliance: a practitioner guide for Irish estate agents & auctioneers

Every property services provider needs a PSRA licence for each category of service it provides:

A

— auction of property other than land (fine art, antiques, livestock)

B

— purchase or sale of land and buildings, by any means, auction or private treaty

C

— letting

D

— property management for owners’ management companies

A firm may hold any combination, and may only provide the services it is licensed for. The business licence must be displayed at the premises; individuals carry a photo licence (psr.ie).

Providing a property service without a licence is a criminal offence under section 28. The offence also catches holding yourself out as available to provide one — including by advertisement, or by displaying any card or other object purporting to show you are a licensee.

It carries two tiers:

• •on summary conviction, a class A fine or up to 12 months’ imprisonment, or both
• •on conviction on indictment, a fine or up to 5 years’ imprisonment, or both — the indictable fine has no statutory cap

The PSRA both prosecutes and has obtained High Court injunctions against unlicensed operators.

Licences run for one year. Most expire on 5 November, and the PSRA’s renewal page puts the corresponding application deadline at 24 September — the Act requires renewal applications at least six weeks before expiry (s.35). File on time and the licence stays in force while the application is decided.

Miss it, absent exceptional circumstances, and the consequences are severe:

• •the licence expires
• •you are treated as never having held one
• •you reapply as a new applicant
• •you cannot trade until the new licence issues

“The renewal notice didn’t arrive” and “our accountant’s report wasn’t ready” are expressly not accepted excuses.

Business renewals must include:

• •an accountant’s report on the client account
• •evidence of professional indemnity insurance
• •fees — €1,380 per business plus €200 per principal or employee, with Compensation Fund contributions of €200 and €50 respectively, effective 1 June 2026

Fees are revised periodically — Licensing (Amendment) Regulations were made in 2024, 2025 and 2026 — so confirm the current figure with the PSRA before you budget or invoice against it.

Holding a licence isn’t a one-off event.

Every licensee must complete a minimum of 5 verifiable hours of formal PSRA CPD education each year, delivered by IPAV, PAI or SCSI — all 5 hours may be completed online. You don’t submit the certificate to the PSRA, but you must keep it: at audit, the PSRA requests Certificates of Completion for the previous four CPD cycles (psr.ie).

That’s a third retention clock to run alongside the others on this page:

• •6 years for service records under section 44
• •5 years for AML records
• •4 years (four CPD cycles) for CPD certificates

Two seven-day clocks run back to back.

1. 1.Under section 43, a signed Property Services Agreement in the specified form must be in place no later than 7 working days after you start providing the service or agree to provide it — whichever comes first.
2. 2.If the client doesn’t return the signed copy within the following 7 working days, you must stop (or not start) the service.

Operating without a PSA is “improper conduct” under the Act.

The same clock runs again whenever the terms change.

Section 43(3)-(4) extends the identical machinery to an amendment, a renewal, or a re-engagement after the agreement expires or is terminated: an amendment must be given to the client, in the specified form and signed by the licensee, no later than 7 working days after it was agreed.

A fee variation or an extended sole-agency period is a fresh agreement for this purpose — and an unsigned amendment fails the same way an unsigned original does.

Underquoting sits on the same enforcement track as every other breach in this guide.

• •Where a vendor asks a licensee to value land for sale, section 55 requires a written statement of the advised market value (AMV) in the specified form within 7 working days of the request — section 55(2) does the same for an advised letting value.
• •Section 56 bans stating an estimated selling price below the AMV — or below the lower limit of a stated range — in advertisements, particulars, to prospective purchasers, or at auction, unless the vendor gives written consent to a lower figure.
• •Section 57 lets the PSRA demand evidence of how any AMV was calculated and whether it was reasonable.

Giving a clearly unreasonable AMV — or advised letting value — is itself defined as improper conduct, which puts underquoting on the same enforcement track as every other breach on this page, up to the €250,000 sanction.

It is also the most publicised PSRA issue in the Irish market — worth getting the valuation file in order before the Authority asks for it.

Section 44 requires a record, in the specified form, of every property service provided, retained for at least 6 years after completion of the transactions it relates to.

The retention duty sits with the licensee who is the property services employer or independent contractor — where an employee or a principal officer actually delivers the service, the obligation stays with the employer, not the individual who did the work.

Section 61 adds the one agents most often miss: where land is offered for sale, other than by auction, a record of every offer received — including conditional acceptances — must be kept for the same 6 years.

The Minimum Standards Regulations 2020 attach two duties to that same offer.

• •You must give written confirmation to every offeror — whether they’re offering to purchase or to rent — on receipt of their offer (reg 15(2)).
• •You may not state or imply to anyone, including your own client, that an offer has been received unless it actually has (reg 15(3)) — the rule the PSRA’s own guidance calls the ban on fake bids.

Where the licensee knows, or has reasonable grounds to believe, that the offeror is the licensee themselves, a principal officer, an employee, the employer, or a connected relative of any of those, the client must be told in writing (reg 15(4)).

Section 45 makes professional indemnity insurance a precondition of providing any property service — but sets no cover level itself. The required amount comes from the Professional Indemnity Insurance Regulations 2012 and its later amendments, not from the Act.

The Client Moneys Regulations 2012:

• •require client moneys to be kept separate from office moneys
• •prohibit withdrawals from a client account except in defined circumstances
• •require balancing statements at defined dates, reported through your accountant to the Authority

The rules are enforced: in 2025 the High Court confirmed a €10,000 penalty on an agent who withdrew from a €50,000 booking deposit held in the client account before contracts were concluded (psr.ie sanctions register).

The PSRA audits licensees — on premises or remotely — and its inspectors can:

• •require records
• •question any person
• •enter and search business premises
• •require authorisation to inspect the firm’s bank accounts

Any person may complain in writing, and the Authority can also investigate on its own initiative.

After a finding of improper conduct the sanctions scale from a reprimand to licence revocation, up to €50,000 towards the Compensation Fund, up to €50,000 in investigation costs, and a financial penalty of up to €250,000 — major sanctions require High Court confirmation, and confirmed sanctions are published.

Alongside the Act sit the Minimum Standards Regulations 2020 (19 binding standards, reg 3 to reg 21 — the first two regulations are citation and definitions — from inducements to conflict-of-interest disclosure) and the 2021 Code of Practice, which regulators may consider when assessing improper conduct.

Almost every obligation above is, in practice, a record-keeping obligation with a clock attached: agreements within 7 working days, offers retained for 6 years, client money movements accounted for at balancing dates, an audit trail an inspector can follow.

That is the problem EstatePilot is built around — offers, viewings, correspondence and status changes are logged with timestamps as part of normal work, so the record an inspection asks for already exists. See compliance software for Irish estate agents or the related guide on AML checks for estate agents.