Then it usually is.

You know how it goes. There’s always some kind of hidden catch, or it’s a scam, or there’s some small-print waiting to trip you up.

On that note, my next mission was to unearth the reasons for the bargain property prices before I got led down the garden path, so to speak.

Why were they so cheap???

With this question in mind, I spent the next few evenings skimming over the Irish listings on the Rightmove website to get a feel for things. The budget I was looking at (around £80k) brought up a reasonably wide spectrum of results:

There were “shells” of houses, which were basically unfinished buildings, with (and without roofs). There were more complete houses with all structural aspects of the build finished, but still requiring cosmetic plasterwork inside or out, along with varying degrees of electrical and plumbing work still to do (cables hanging out of the wall where lights are to be fixed and pipework rising up from the floor where radiators are yet to be connected). Some would argue this would be within scope of a competent DIY enthusiast (which means money and time……so, not me). But, there were also properties which required no work at all, so I concentrated my efforts on these.

Of the better quality properties, the things I picked up on was:

• Mostly all had a septic tank.
• Accompanying land was also offered as part of the sale, averaging an acre.
• Noticeable space in-between detached homes and the nearest neighbour when on an “estate”.
• Private well

(More on these bullet points later)

Further internet research on the property market in the Republic of Ireland (ROI) showed that without doubt, the main reason for the low prices was due to the economic collapse of ROI post 2008. (The “boom” period prior to this being known as the Celtic Tiger years).

So overall, my initial suspicions were not unfounded! But this wasn’t quite as bad as I had first feared, because it meant the (completed) bricks and mortar constructions fundamentally had nothing wrong with them. They weren’t poorly made or built above a mine shaft or giant sink hole! They’d just had their value severely stripped due to the financial crash. Now, as a seller, this could be a pretty awful situation, but as a buyer, this could possibly be a good move (pun intended).

Now I’d established the reason for the low prices, the next step was to see how Irish property compared against my existing list of suitable British properties, primarily focussing on quality of location, location, location and availability of jobs.

Read the next post here.