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

I know a few people who still think Homebond is worth the paper its written on.

When the pyrite problem appeared they covered people, until they found that there were a lot more houses with pyrite. Then suddenly homebond wasnt worth the paper it was written on. Scam.

There are a LOT of Celtic Tiger era builds that are really not looking their best these days, and there a plethora of cases of apartment blocks with issues. There's an apartment block near my house that's of the era, and it really does look rough. A lot of the houses from that time were of poor quality too, and one has to wonder how they will fare in another 20 years.

One would hope that the current generation of new builds are of a higher quality, but we may be assured of one thing; the builders will be long gone if there are problems with them in 20 years.

Well in the block I'm thinking of, the render is filthy, and the window frames are covered in moss on the outside. It doesn't seem especially well-maintained, so I'd wonder how much the management company is doing for the property.

From my own experience so many Sale Agreeds fall through because an agent's fibs and/or omissions got rumbled.

I went sale agreed 3 times last year, didn't buy any of them.

1. The house was a bit of a wreck and needed an extension, we budgeted €450k for renovations and an extension and an architect gave us rough costs or €700k to do the work we wanted. Had this more or less verified by a QS and withdrew our offer almost immediately.

2. The house was supposed to be B3 rated and in great condition but a survey threw up a lot of little issues and we caught the seller outright lying about one of them when queried on it so we didn't trust a thing we were being told about the house and pulled out. It was very expensive for what it was and only made any kind of sense of you didn't need to put a cent into the existing structure, that wasn't the case. It was taken off the market before Christmas, didn't sell. The agent was also somebody you wouldn't trust in the slightest.

3. Great house, loved it and we were very happy with the price even though we'd agreed to pay €45k over asking, no issues with the survey this time. 7 weeks go by and the deal hasn't moved an inch, eventually the estate agent calls us to tell us the sellers are getting divorced (not disclosed to us initially, we were told their kids had grown up and they wanted to downsize) and the wife now wants to pause the whole thing (husband very much the opposite). We were fed some bullshít about her changing solicitors and this being her new legal advice but I'm pretty sure she never had any intention of selling the house based on how the process never moved at all. I'm guessing she played along with the sale in order to get the husband to move out and then reneged on it as soon as he was gone so she could stay living there by herself.

So there you go, three different reasons why a sale might fall through. I doubt an agent would be honest with anyone about the first two, and the third one the house wasn't for sale anyway so they just took the ad down and I doubt it will be going back on the market anytime soon. I would say she fed us a lot of bullshít about why the seller has changed their mind to save face, she got duped by them initially.

What kind of extension were you looking at? I'm in the same boat trying to weigh up buying an already extended or doing it myself. Most things online will say cost is 2,500-3,000 per sqm. We'd be looking at a 50-70sq m extension which would be in our budget but then all I hear are stories of people being quoted 300-400k for a bog standard semi d extension. 700k sounds like madness!

Channel 4 can make a new show for Irish audiences a spin off of Location, location location to

Regulation, regulation, regulation

Of course they make sense, but it's not the difference between cost of construction being so out of kilter between the 2 jurisdictions on our island.

There are a group of new builds near my mom that are going on the marker soon in Dublin 5. They're priced at 875k, whilst a good condition house in the area would be about 600k. That's a huge mark-up, but some of them have apparently already sold.

Personally speaking, if I had the funds, my choice would be an old house in Dublin. I absolutely love the old red-brick houses from the 19th century that are found around the city, and I would love to buy a neglected house and do it up nicely. It's a pipe-dream for now, but we'll see in the future.

they’re going up again anyway.

Has anybody ever heard of a RPZ being rescinded?

I haven't.

Seems to me it's more likely a government will just extend RPZ across the entire country.

Wasn't that exact premium quoted recently in this very thread as being to the tune of tens of thousands of euros on an average house?

And that not even accounting for some of the dodgy vertical integration that a lot of developers do to minimise profit.

A quick google brings this up as the relevant figures from 2016, you can add circa 25% on top to all of them for now.

Most people absolutely (and correctly) would, but J_1980 claimed "most new houses and apartments are basically just construction costs + vat."

I doubt if there's any evidence to support that at all.

Seems like old wives tales.

Standards have changed between 2012 and 2024. Best worker building to poor standards with poor material. Average worker building to higher standards with higher quality material.

The Pyrite investigation showed "the legacy of building failures or severe non-compliance concerns following the downturn in economic and construction activity in 2008, which exposed vulnerabilities in the building control system that was in place at that time"

New builds are mainly desirable here as there’s so many government supports tied to purchasing them. We’ve bought in a new build and 5 years later moved to a 1990 build house and if we moved again I’d never buy a new build again.