Softening house market?

Well it isn't a great sign, buffer-wise or attitude wise, if one is having to plan months in advance to top up that investment mortgage to go on a holiday. Having to fund fairly routine day-to-day expenses on credit (and then making snide comments to some other poster about that poster drinking cheap coffee in the dark or whatever it was before the post was deleted).

You're only really buying a site which will have a fairly certain chance of obtaining planning permission, albeit one where you might be restricted what you can do in order to make sure that you preserve the existing structure too

There would usually be conditions to incorporate an old vernacular structure into any house. That appears to be an old cottage. I don't see any pipes/sinks and there is possibly only an outside toilet. So I reckon you could be fairly certain you'd have to incorporate it.

It doesn't depend on whether the house is currently habitable. Just whether there is a house there. What constitutes a "house" may be open to debate. You hear stories of people where there is an old structure and they are able to go back on old maps etc. to prove that there was a house there in order to increase their chances of getting permission.

Local needs wouldn't be relevant for that site as the house is already there. That doesn't mean you'll get permission to change it to what you want though! I know a man who couldn't get permission for a new house but was able to get permission to build onto an old clay walled cottage that hadn't been lived in for about 70 years and had instead been used as a shed for that time. But he had to keep the old clay walls and renovate the old cottage and basically build a separate building out the back joined onto it if you know what I mean.

I think the "roof" thing is just an old "rule of thumb" that people used to say. "Services" shouldn't matter. Which ones would you include? ESB - well you can just connect. Water main - plenty of houses have wells. Sewerage pipe - plenty of houses have septic tanks.

Obviously the more intact it is the better. But that doesn't mean you won't get it if say the roof has been gone for a few years. Especially if it is an old traditional building and you are going to "preserve" it by doing it up

Those kinds of valuations are madness too. Because permission in a given location is fairly arbitrary in the sense that if you can get it in this field, you could probably also get it in the field next door. That is within the remit of the State and controlled by it, and yet it allows that kind of scenario to develop....Rather than say zoning a specific field as a cluster and then allowing someone to sit on it to hold others to ransom, why not "provisionally rezone" a stretch of 10 fields beside each other and say that there will be one cluster there and the first to sell/get permission/lock-it-in gets the available cluster.

The fact there is an existing house there may restrict what you can do or cause additional building expense compared to a greenfield site. Or it may just be that the asking may be low relative to the locality to drum up interest.

How does this compare to 2019?

I think comparing this year to COVID years isn't going to give a realistic impression of the market.

The house we are buying had an 8+ year tenancy at ridiculously low rent. Vendor (investment, lives in another country) couldn't raise the rent to current levels so is getting out.

Massive Social Housing population in there. Perhaps issues in that sense?

Duplex own door properties seem to getting zero interest. A friend of mine has his on market for months but with nobody viewing it so his family can't buy a semi d which he has top up mortgage approval for. Another one near me has had its asking price reduced on Daft. Other identical properties were being snapped up in weeks last Spring at well in excess of asking prices before the interest rates and energy prices started going crazy.

I think we'll have a radically different picture of the property market come January once the next ECB rate increase (or two) kick in combined with the soaring winter cost of living expenses kick in.

If you are in a position to hold off buying for a few more months, you could save 10s of 1000s.

I bought in 2008, I still remember being outbid for houses right up till March of 2008. Houses were getting outbid like it is today (albeit maybe like 30~40k, not 100k). Only few months later the whole thing went from a buzz of activity to dying. 

The house I ended up buying in May had no active offers and the previous person had dropped his offer. I got a nice 30k off the asking price. I personally thing I made the best choice, as the bank wouldn't lend me and the missus what they did back in the day !

The market can go anywhere in months.

Not to sound alarmist but it sounds like the arse is falling out of the market, especially the higher end stuff

The price drop trend that’s been referenced here. Maybe arse falling is a tad dramatic but there’s definitely a “correction” going on