Make sure that the head rules the heart

Don’t be wooed by market assumptions and incentives: with property, it still comes down to buying what you can afford, when you can afford it.

Financial surprises are more likely to be of the negative variety, so realism is essential.

I speak with many prospective home buyers and investors every week and, quite frankly, in recent years there was little to be positive about. It feels like the property market in Ireland, and particularly in Dublin, went straight from broken to buoyant – or arguably to a different type of broken – with no levelling-off period. This unpredictable movement made it difficult to get an accurate reading of the market and, therefore, research ...