Very few Irish people are buying new apartments. Is it because they can’t or won’t?

23 comments
  1. Because its usually a terrible value proposition. No guarantee you’ll not be stuck with bad neighbours, a bad management company or both

  2. It’s pretty straightforward. Most new apartments are built to rent by investing firms. So you can’t buy those as it’s not an option. And anything from the Celtic Tiger period has the build quality of a tent, but stacked vertically to maximise all the downsides. Whatever is leftover is ludicrously expensive when compared to a house. I would like to live in an apartment, but I have only once been in a properly built block. I have been in shit ones dozens of times. That’s why people don’t want them.

  3. I live in a block of 4 apartments, just share a hallway with one other and I love it to be honest, 2 bedroom and have one converted into an office

    Near to everything and can walk to work and get a coffee on the way if I have a meeting on site

  4. I got an email from a development in cherrywood this week.

    2 bed apartment starting at €445k, then you will have annual management fees.

    You would need an income of €120k to afford a 1 of them.

  5. I considered it when we were house hunting a few years ago, basically looked at buying the apt that was next door to the one we were renting, but the property management company sucked.

    In retrospect, thank goodness I didn’t spend the lockdowns in a small 2 bed apartment though, would have gone stir crazy and both of us working from home would have been tricky

  6. I checked on Daft and couldn’t find a single new flat in Dublin under 500k. I am sure there are some but they are rare. So they are just are not being offered for sale.

  7. Very few new single apartments are for sale.

    Most new apartments are sold in bulk to property managers / investors.

    Also the price between new apartments and houses isn’t there. Any New 2 beds is south Dublin / north Wicklow go for north of 350k. You would get a decent older house for that in the same areas. Between the two who is going to play that amount for a apartment with a 90 minute commute. Apartments SHOULD be cheaper then a house and they simply arent because the entire market is fucked.

  8. Apartments in Ireland are dark, card-walled, dingy boxes. Anything better is either held by a fund, or sold way over their worth.

  9. Because of NIMBYism hardly any of the new ones available to buy are built in/near the urban centres where the value proposition of living in the city outweighs the negatives of the reduced space and flexibility of owning an apartment. Having apartments in housing estates 10k from the city centre makes sense from a land use perspective, but makes fuck all sense from a compromise perspective.

    You only need to look at the fuckhead running the ‘Dundrum resident’ Facebook group NIMBYing the fuck out of a large block of apartments in Dundrum there where it makes sense to build them, and offering the solution of building them in the middle of nowhere as a microcosm of the attitude towards sensible apartment building in this country.

  10. Go on daft and look at some the price of some of the apartments that are not even brand new. 275,000 for a two bed up in santry and them apartments are boarding twenty years old and that’s without refurbishment. Nevermind a back garden or front

  11. It is almost impossible for a single buyer to purchase an apartment in Dublin because they’re very rarely on the market after being bought and sold by the batch to investors. I had to move out of Dublin to get even a shite one.

    Banks are also cagey about offering a mortgage on a one bed, and a lot of the Celtic Tiger built stuff is made out of papier mache.

  12. The prices have become so outrageous that average people can no longer afford new homes. Ordinary sized sized apartments in Dublin are now priced at 500,000 euros or higher. Unless you have a two income household, with both in high pay professions, it is virtually impossible to buy anything.

    There is a strange puzzle in the Irish housing market. Ireland is a low population, rural country with vast open lands. It is understandable that high housing prices exist in densely populated areas with no available land, like Hong Kong or Manhattan, but how does this make sense in Ireland? Our housing prices should be low, not high. Something is behind the scenes causing an artificial bubble in our housing prices, in my opinion.

  13. For me? Won’t.

    I considered buying a duplex, but decided I’d rather wait a little longer, and get a garden, driveway, the ability to do substantial DIY, and have less issues with neighbours.

    Also, (most) houses are flexible with regard to extensions, apartments are inherently not. So if I need more space, I don’t need to sell up.

  14. Small point

    “she says, adding that interest is also coming from international tech-sector workers”

    This is such a trope. “Tech workers” is an excuse being trotted out for half the issues in the property sector. How many of them do you think there are? This is a total fantasy that there’s hoardes of high income tech workers in Ireland.

    The majority of staff at Google, LinkedIn, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook are people in their 20s earning less than 50k.

    Mostly in bog standard Sales or Customer Service jobs

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