Irish Property Market chat II - *read mod note post #1 before posting*

"no good investments"

It's the people selling the houses who made good investments, not the ones buying!

The northwest is a unique case due to defective blocks - the shortage there is much worse than rest of the country because so many 2nd hand homes are just not viable to purchase. Then add in the construction labour tied up in repairs/rebuilds... Expect prices there to rise 10% or more per annum for the next few years.

Another problem is the number of s**ty celtic tiger builds that are all over the country. From apartment blocks full of issues to cardboard houses, I really wonder how these houses will age given that many of them already look to be in poor nick. There's a block of apartments in the town I live in that look very rough, and they're only 20 years old. One would hope that new builds are of a higher quality.

I agree on your second paragraph. I'm 37, so I'm a bit old to be emigrating, but I do sometimes think that I should have jumped ship. I'm actually eligible for Italian citizenship, and I speak the language quite well. Winters in Wexford do sometimes make me wonder if an apartment in Lucca would not be a better option for a single man...

I’m really surprised that €500k can’t buy a house in the cheapest part of the country for property prices.

Limited number of suppliers who were supplying millions of blocks a month at peak.

Much of Donegal affected - as a result there are not many unaffected properties available at any price. The supply simply doesn't exist, as nobody who holds a non-defective home is willing to move (and there isn't supply of new builds either for them to move into).

It's an example of a market totally stuck by lack of supply. The game of musical chairs is broken there.

sounds like you don’t know what you want, house in Kildare Donegal or move to Canada might you would do better posting in the personals section in boards

Yes can imagine Donegal market is fairly dysfunctional at the minute. Rising at the fastest pace in the country too and hard to see it going any other way with Mica demand.

Canada certainly has its pluses. A number of my friends live there. Two biggest drawbacks though

• Winters are brutal in Toronto. Golf courses closed due to Ice from November through to almost late April. As a friend said, if you don’t love skiing you’re basically stuck inside for 6 months a year. Vancouver is warmer but rains like you wouldn’t believe. Summers are much better than here.

• More relevant to this thread: if you think the Irish property market is expensive…I know some fairly successful people out in both cities and don’t know anybody who’s managed to buy anything but a tiny 1 or 2 bed apartment. Nobody I know sees it as feasible to raise a family, all just making some cash and coming back to Ireland for some cheaper housing.

That’ll work alright!

Do it for a few years - then you can buy the entire county of Donegal when you get back.

However, in submissions to the council, local residents have raised concerns about the level of development planned and have threatened to “oppose any attempt to build high-rise developments” near their homes.

these people need to be stopped

vancouver at least is like ireland in 2005, my brother is there and he is getting on well, they have a nice family house but also held on to the small 2 bed condo they lived in originally, he is mortgaged up to his eyeballs, recent interest rate increases meant he had to find an extra 3k canadian per month!

he seems happy enough though!

The council will just ignore any objections. Planning permission for these habitation blocks is just window dressing.