Finding our place

Not short of character..

Having spent the summer living locally, we found the cottage just days before we left. We'd gone back to the internet to check over old searches, broaden our criteria and raise the price bar a bit to see if anything new came up. And there it was, a traditional cottage a mile or so outside the village. It had been on the market for some time but we'd missed it. Worth a drive-by but outside our budget. I think we knew it was 'ours' as soon as we got there.

We managed to find the keyholder the next day and persuaded the engineer to come and have a look with us. We took as many pictures as we could, talked to the auctioneer, checked the land registry and planning applications, consulted our friendly thatcher, and put in an offer - all in the space of three days.

...and what a view!

At this point all the time looking and the false-starts paid off. Having finance in place, knowing what to ask, and having good local contacts meant we could do things quickly when we needed to. Getting good advice also saved us a lot of money. No-one else had viewed it and we offered half the asking price. It wasn't enough but with patience and a bit of brinkmanship we reached a fair compromise. The sale process took forever...but that's another story.

Location, location

Location, location?

They say location is everything, and in the end it was. We first stayed in the village in the summer of 2009 and (like many 'blow-ins') fell in love with the place. It certainly ticked all our boxes, it had sea and mountains, a lively village life and some of the best traditional music in the country. The only problem was that property prices were sky high and we couldn't afford a pile of stones on our meagre budget!

However, it settled us on finding somewhere within an hour of Galway and accessible to the Burren or Connemara. We came close to buying a 'bargain' of a little farm by the sea but escaped at the last minute a messy (and potentially life threatening) neighbour dispute. And the moral of the story...do look a gift horse in the mouth and if it looks too good to be true, it probably is!

For all the searching during 2009 we had little to show for it than a long 'short-list' of affordable properties, all of which had drawbacks and none of which were where we wanted to be. As fortune would have it, the new year brought an opportunity to live and work in Co. Galway for a few months, and the chance to rent a house nearby. Settling into the village life and making friends left us with little interest in buying elsewhere but there was still nothing we could even afford to look at. 

Another nice setting...shame about the flaky concrete



During the summer of 2010, with the economy slipping into free fall, asking prices were starting to come down and buyers with finance were getting thinner on the ground. We didn't have much money but we did have it in cash.

We kept on looking at cottages up and down the West coast, even though they weren't quite 'right'. We nearly bought a two-story in a lovely location near Lough Corrib but the degrading mass concrete and asbestos roof posed too many concerns. By the final week of our summer in residence we'd exhausted all the options but had confirmed that we wanted to buy in the village, if not now then some time in the future.

In the beginning...



Another Celic Tiger investment opportunity

Our search for a cottage in Ireland started out from a combination of family ties (her), an obsession with Irish traditional music (him) and a bit of naive optimism about 'investment potential' in the Celtic Tiger!. Towards the end of the property bubble we were as stunned as everyone else by the spiralling prices of million euro bog plots and reconciled ourselves to browsing Daft.ie for places we couldn't dream of affording. 

During 2008, as the economy began to slide, we took a more systematic approach and decided we'd buy somewhere if we could get it at the right price. At this point we had no fixed idea where we wanted to be - in the East where we had family or the West where we took our holidays...or just anywhere we could afford. We started browsing every cheap detached house or bugalow that came on the market across the country. It was time consuming but helped narrow down our options and preferences. We also made contact with various people who were generous with their advice and who would help us greatly later on.

We set ourselves an increasingly unlikely list of demands. We wanted a detached rural cottage but we wanted to be within an hour's drive of city civilisation (and an airport connected to the North of England). We wanted to be within a mile or two of a village with a general store and, ideally, a pub with great traditional music sessions. We wanted to be close to either the sea or the mountains (or both!) and preferably with a bit of a view. And we wanted all of it for a budget of €100,000...including structural renovation works!