Which county would suit me best?

Well, as I had never been to Ireland before, I needed to do some serious research.

I had 3 main factors that would decide if a county was suitable:

1. Prices of property
2. Jobs available
3. Tourism strength (As I may decide to venture into entrepreneurial pursuits later on)

Jobs available

I started researching for available jobs first, because I figured that having a job to pay for a property would be top of the list, regardless of the price! I went on the biggest three jobsites I could find. They all handily featured a page on their sites which listed all counties and the number of jobs advertised for that county. I copied these three pages and added them to a spreadsheet individually. I then worked out the average jobs per county. Here’s an example for County Clare:

• Jobsite 1 showed 100 jobs
• Jobsite 2 showed 122 jobs
• Jobsite 3 showed 99 jobs

100 + 122 + 99 = 321

321 divided by 3 (because we are using 3 statistics) = 107.

107 would be the average number of jobs for county Clare.

(Average can be worked out in a variety of different ways, but I prefer the “add everything up and divide by the number of statistics method).

Using this method, I could see quite clearly which counties had the highest amount of jobs. I then sorted the spreadsheet in ascending order, so the county with the most jobs was at the top, followed by the 2nd highest and so on.

I knew Dublin would be high on the list, but I preferred the thought of being somewhere a little less busy, so omitted this from my results. This left the following job count:

1. Cork 749
2. Galway 329
3. Limerick 317
4. Clare 170
5. Kerry 104

There is quite a big difference between Cork and Kerry, as you can see, so it was worth analysing this stuff!

Prices of property

I scoured all the main Irish property websites and searched for property up to €100,000 euros for the 5 counties listed above.

(If you read my previous post, you’ll know that I was offered a mortgage of £72,000 here in the UK. I added my deposit to this, making my rough figure £80k. At the time of writing, £80k is worth €113,000).

Each property I thought suitable, I saved to a favourites folder. At the end of this I had about 100 properties. I then added these to a spreadsheet, listing the town, county and advertised price of each property.

I sorted all of these by county and averaged the property price for each county.

All counties were around the €70k mark, so well within budget.

The only thing that seemed to really vary was the amount of properties available within budget, per county. But surely, I’ll only be buying one property, so this doesn’t really matter!

Overall, this meant that in terms of prices, all five of the counties I’d identified as being ‘top’ in terms of jobs (other than Dublin) were also suited to my budget.

Tourism strength

This, in my mind, would be the icing on the cake.

I have an entrepreneurial streak and would like to keep my options open for the future when it comes to money-making. If I start a Bed and Breakfast or photography studio, or let out the property in many years to come, it would be reassuring to know that there is a potential market.

I discovered a few juicy documents online, (Fáilte Ireland) listing Ireland’s tourism statistics for last year.

Listed in the breakdown was:

Total popularity by region, overseas visitors by county, overseas visitor revenue by county, domestic travel by Irish residents, profile of overseas visitors, accommodation capacity by region…. and the list goes on. A good find!

I devoured all these figures and threw them into the mix, alongside what I’d worked out about property prices and job availability.

Conclusion

• Co. Cork would be first choice for jobs and tourism
• Co. Galway would be second (less jobs than Cork, but equal in tourist count)
• Co. Kerry would be third (good for tourists, crap for work)

So that’s the homework done and the theory worked out, but what about the practical aspect? What would I think about these places if I was actually there?

The best thing to do would be to go on a scouting mission and see what I think about Ireland in general.

I decided to spend two weeks touring the country.