Estate agent Savills Ireland will reopen its former flagship branch on Dawson Street in Dublin today. The move comes in the same week the Central Statistics Office announced the biggest increase in residential house prices in the capital since 2005.

Savills closed the residential office in 2007 following the property collapse, moving operations back to Molesworth Street. The branch, beside the Mansion House, will now be home to Savills’s residential, country house and new-homes teams, comprising about 10 staff.

According to Graham Murray, head of residential sales, international buyers are helping to drive a lot of the early recovery signs in the market, accounting for about 20 per cent of sales so far this year. “In the past 12 months, we have gone from wondering if the bottom of the market would ever come to a rise of over 15 per cent, and higher in key areas of the city. We are back to competitive bidding for prime property in a number of cases.”

Savills has a strong presence in the commercial property sector here, while it has made significant inroads into the residential market in the past year. This has led to a strengthening of the team, including the recent appointment of a director of research, John McCartney.