The estate-agency ecosystem of Sligo and Leitrim, mapped: every licence, every partner, every euro
Counties Sligo and Leitrim hold 140 licensed property services providers, and in a good week those firms talk to each other about twenty times: the solicitor chasing a title, the engineer signing off, the broker arranging the mortgage, the auctioneer across the street who has the buyer the other one does not. Each of those conversations is a referral. Almost none of it lands on paper.
So we wrote it down. This is a complete map of the estate-agency ecosystem of the two counties: who is licensed, who serves the same customer without competing, who supplies them, who already sells to them, and what the market those relationships sit in is worth in euro. It is a worked example, built for individual agencies and for institutions, and the whole thing is free to read, download and check.
What's in the pack
- The interactive map: click any partner to see why they made the list and what to say to them.
- The 20-page report (PDF): the full written map, branded, carrying every chart in this article and the method behind them.
- The spreadsheet (XLSX): 140 licence holders by name and licence number, the 59 ranked partners
with their public contact routes and drafted opening angles, plus the town-by-town coverage matrix, the gaps, the pricing and the method.
The size of the field
The register of licensed property services providers held by the Property Services Regulatory Authority is the list that counts. Read live and in full: 140 licensed providers in the two counties (87 in Sligo and 53 in Leitrim), from 6,144 nationally. Those licences split by what the holder is permitted to do.
The register is the only genuine list of who may trade. It is also where most \"local business lists\" stop, and that is why they are close to useless: a licence tells you a firm exists. It does not tell you whether the firm is worth a call.
How a sale actually moves: the five buckets
Every organisation in the map sits in one of five buckets, and the bucket decides how you approach it.
- Complements, 44 organisations
- Peers / competitors, 5 organisations
- Channels / buyers, 5 organisations
- Suppliers, 5 organisations
The split decides the approach. Complements share your customer without competing for the sale, so the trade is reciprocal. One introduction through a channel reaches further than fifty cold calls, because channels already sell something to hundreds of local business owners. Peers are competitors. The use for a competitor in a map is to know who is busy, who is quiet and where they do not go.
The partner graph
The whole ecosystem is one picture. The centre is the agency. Every ring is one of the five layers, and every node is a named organisation with a public contact route.
Each of the 59 entries carries four things: what it is, where it is, a public way to reach it, and a confidence rating. The rating says whether the entry came off a statutory register (Confirmed), a public business source (Probable) or a single mention (Weak signal).
The market, in euro
The Property Price Register records every sale in the state. We ran the two counties through it for the twelve months to the middle of September 2026.
| Measure | Sligo | Leitrim | Both counties |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recorded sales, last 12 months | 817 | 449 | 1266 |
| Median sale price | €267,000 | €220,000 | n/a |
| Total value of those sales | €233.9m | €100.0m | €333.9m |
| Commission pool at 1.5% of value (before VAT) | €3.51m | €1.50m | €5.01m |
| Licensed providers sharing it | 87 | 53 | 140 |
| Commission pool per licensed provider | n/a | n/a | €35,776 |
All figures in euro, drawn from the Property Price Register (full-market-price sales only), for the twelve months ending 18 September 2026. The commission pool multiplies total sale value by 1.5%, before VAT, and you can adjust it to your own schedule. Averages conceal the wide spread between firms.
Read it straight: roughly €334m of property changes hands in these two counties every year, which at a 1.5% fee is a €5.0m commission pool shared across 140 licensed providers. The average share is about €35,776 a year, and the spread around that average is wide. Partners are how a firm takes a bigger share of a pool it does not control.
What the same money buys in each town
County averages tell you nothing when you trade in one town, so the map goes town by town.
Coverage, and the gaps we are not going to hide
Stack the 16 partner categories against the towns in both counties and a pattern turns up: Sligo town is deep, the rural towns are thin, and a handful of categories come back empty in places.
A blank cell means one thing: nothing was found in the sources checked. It is a research task, not proof that no such firm exists. A county with three post offices and one good solicitor does not always make it into open data. Every blank is listed by name in the report.
What makes this a map and not a list
| Layer | What it adds |
|---|---|
| Licence base, read live | 140 licence holders by name, number and licence type: the only authoritative list of who may trade |
| Every sale in the county | The state's own record, 766,574 usable sale records nationally, cut to the two counties |
| Named partners | 59 organisations across 16 categories, each with a public contact route |
| Confidence on every row | Confirmed, Probable or Weak signal, traceable to a named source |
| Opening angles | Two to three drafted approaches per category, written as a trade rather than a favour |
| The town picture | Median price and a coverage matrix, town by town |
| Route to market | 48 verified organisations that already sell to local businesses |
| Tools that work | This map, a spreadsheet you can sort, and a report you can hand to a partner |
Closing the town gap
The register publishes no addresses, so every licence currently sits at county level and not in a town. That is the limit of this version. Four steps fix it: read the register detail page behind each of the 140 licences to recover the address; join Eircode routing keys to towns and townlands; phone the 12 blank towns once each to separate \"no such firm\" from \"not recorded\"; then reissue the coverage grid town by town, every quarter. That turns a county map with towns in it into a town map.
Get one for your town or your county
This document is the Sligo and Leitrim worked example. Every county in Ireland gets the same map built the same way.
- Single agency, single county: €490. Your own ecosystem, ranked, including the opening angles, the town picture and the spreadsheet.
- Institutional tier: €1,500 to €2,500. Built for a Chamber, a Local Enterprise Office, an enterprise hub or a professional body: the county mapped, white-labelled for your members, with the register and the market data behind it.
- Kept current tier: €99 a month. We re-check the register, new openings and closures, and reissue the map each quarter.
An agent who wants a town mapped, or a body that wants the county version for its members: write to [email protected] with the county in the subject line, and we will send the relevant sample.
Sources and method
PSRA register of licensed property services providers (read live, 140 of 6,144 licence holders across the two counties); the Property Price Register (every recorded sale in the State, 766,574 usable records, full-market-price sales only); the solicitors list from Sligo County Council; SEAI assessor listings; the IAASA audit register; OpenStreetMap Ireland (Overpass API); named firm websites; and a verified sweep of 48 referral organisations already selling to local businesses. Rankings multiply bucket weight by confidence; the method, the confidence definitions and every source sit in full in the report and the workbook.