Just as a matter of interest why do people visit the property pin.
I visit cause I am back from England 1 year ago and I want to buy a house cause I got two kids(3 and 5) and a wife (who looks after the kids). I am currently refusing to buy until there are drops of at least 25% on current prices. If this does not happen I will leave Ireland again and move to New york or london (I do investment banking). I know the prices will drop by more than this if the market is left alone. I can’t be sure however that the market will in fact be left alone cause we have a serious problem with our builder friendly government so I have an exit strategy (london or NY).
By taking this approach I am seriouly inconvencing my kids as we live in a tiny 2 bed apartment. I hope my risk pays off but of couse I got no guarantees.
What’s everybody else up to? 
Apart from bashing estate agents … 
I live, work and own a Home (as opposed to a house!) in London. Doing alright I guess. Why do I come on here - mainly because at some stage in the future I might want to come back to Ireland wife 'er indoors and any future family.
For the last few years I have seen the worst of the worst kind of me fein culture grow and grow in my native land. I’m not for a minute suggesting we all start dancing at the cross roads again, but I strongly believe that people have to say “enough”, and look at what is really happening in Ireland and what underpins it.
Creating “wealth” through selling expensive pieces of real estate isn’t any sustainable economic model. We badly need to invest in R&D, to look to the future and create a modern economic model.
I suppose the Pin is a bit cathartic for me, seeing as though I have been shouted down from the rooftops in the last few years at the mear suggestion that selling shoeboxes in Sneem for €500k wasn’t such a great thing (Whenever I venture home)
Oh, and the other chestnut of “being jealous cause you missed the BOOM” - sure I’ve been scratching me ar$e over here for the last seven years building up a business that actually produces something 
The diaspora are pi$$ed ,and we are starting to rise!
Because I’ve a background in economics though I work in IT now, and the Pin is probably the only source of quality economic and financial information. Our mainstream media, and every other Irish online forum, is just full of utter rubbish.
I too have seen the degeneration over the last decade into an ugly vicious cute-hoor me fein culture. The Pin gives me some small hope that not everybody in Ireland has turned into a complete asshole in recent years. There’s also some small crumb of comfort that the Pinsters may, possibly, become the intellectual nucleus of a sea-change in Irish politics and society over the next decade.
The entire current political class and the media commentariat are, to be blunt, morons to a man (and woman). I haven’t seen any of them even begin to show the slightest glimmer of comprehension about the scale of the current mess, any recognition of where we have gone wrong and the mistakes we have made, never mind showing any ideas on how to fix it.
If the Pin achieves nothing else, it is at least a permanent record that there were people in Ireland who knew what was happening, warned against it, predicted exactly what would happen, and proposed sensible policy solutions - but we are all locked out of the cosy corrupt inner circle, so we were and are ignored. It’s vital that future generations know that.
I use the pin to get away from the BULLshite I had to listen to at work!
EA’s with 10 + yrs experience still have no concept of reality - facinating.
For what it’s worth ‘BertieBasher’ - I think you are spot on with your judgement and your family will thank you in the not so distant future. I have also taken similar measures…
Long live the PIN !
ps. What are we all going to do with our Pin Addiction when the market does all go completely Tits up? 
Tell me about it! I only came here to learn more about a much needed house price crash. I didn’t realise I would get caught up in financial tsunami’s, a global banking crisis, SIV’s, 3rd level assets, the 2nd coming of the Weimar Republic, derivatives meltdown, gold, recession, dollar collapse, a bank run, financial scandals and peak oil. 
I feel sick. I’m going to bed. see you in the morning.
Id echo the above comment. Also, it seems to me that the majority of the posters here seem to have spent some time outside the country, either having lived abroad for a continuous period or having done a bit of travelling and Im not talking about 6 months in Bondi. Is that why people around here appear to be able to take a bit more of an objective view of the place rather than just blindly following the herd? Maybe Im wrong in this observation but Id be interested to hear whether anyone else is of the same opinion.
…because every bubble bursts and its nice to get in ahead of the inevitable sometimes .
*I told you so *works better before the fact , not when the 20/20 hindsight mob starts on the subject !
By then we wil have moved on to de recovery in the post Bertie wastelands. Yes I lived abroad for many years .
I’m an Aquarius, with Aquarius Rising so I am contractually obliged by the universe not to follow the herd. I only found that out a few months back typically “I knew…” already.
I was abroad and felt aggrieved that I couldn’t live like I wanted in Dublin (or at least I felt I couldn’t). I became interested in murmurings on the web (particularly on AAM) about possible house price crashes back home.
Then someone started what could’ve been an insignificant thread about current public sentiment towards the housing market. I expected the poster to get some abuse and the thread to die a quick death. The rest is history 
I can confidently say I am far more financially and economically literate a year and a few months later.
I came to correct spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.
During the whole bubble I always felt that house prices were over valued. I had no justification for it. If property prices came up I’d keep my thoughts to myself as I’d be unable to give facts to back up what was generally only a hunch. The PIN, I suppose, gives my hunch some intellectual rigour and confidence that I was right to rent for the last couple of years and save my money.
In the short time I’ve been a member of the PIN it has also educated me a little in the ways of high finance, I still don’t really know what a SIV or CDO is, but I think I know that some sketchy stuff has been going on with them, which is why I’d’ve lost my hard saved money in Northern Rock if it hadn’t been for the Bank of Lizzie.
I think the PIN and its regular posters are doing people like me, with less financial knowledge a great service, long may it last.
isn’t it funny how that one thread I started has spread so far and wide 
i post here to try and add a bit of balance to the equation.
too many super-doom-mongers here with little or no grasp of reality.
figures never lie and i have personally put pay to a myth or two using figures and reason.
Hmmm.
I agree with 80%+ of what you have to say on economics, but I have to say I find some of this sociological analysis pretty suspect, and I can’t help but feel that you (along with one or two of the other regulars on here) are somewhat over-romanticising the past.
Let me relate some of my own experience by way of context. During the early to mid 1990’s I worked in a small but relatively lucrative accountancy practice in Dublin city centre. It was my introduction, such as it was, to Irish business life.
Practically every client, as I recall it, availed of the 1993 tax amnesty. I.e., they had been previously been defrauding the revenue, and took the opportunity to ‘come clean’. In fact, it was subsequently ascertained that one of the larger clients had been systematically defrauding the revenue for decades, and they didn’t even bother coming clean in '93. Well, the past eventually caught up with them and they were subsequently stung for millions of euro, and deservedly so, as part of the Revenue’s recent offshore assets investigations.
It was a given, during that period, that accountants would produce different sets of accounts for different purposes. One for the client (representing the true picture). One for the revenue (representing the profit the client wished to declare, for tax purposes). And in some cases, a third version for the bank, representing a somewhat more, shall we say, ‘optimistic’ version of the first.
The idea that ‘spivvery’, for want of a better word, is something new or recent in Ireland is really a theory I don’t buy. True, we have had the emergence of a particular kind of spiv in recent years, the property spiv. RobboPaddy, as he is called on here.
But other forms of spivvery have been with us for a long time. Tax evasion, for one thing, was if anything far MORE common in, for example, the '70s and the '80s. We now know - though we didn’t at the time - that the Ansbacher deposits were a massive tax fraud perpetrated by the wealthy (the so-called great and good) on the taxpayer (and therefore, on the people of Ireland). We now know (though we didn’t at the time) what Ray Burke was up to back in the '70’s and '80s.
And as for dodgy solicitors, well they’re nothing new either! I have a very clear, very distinct recollection sometime in the late 80’s, of seeing a brand new Porsche cruising through Foxrock village (even in that part of Dublin, flashy cars like that weren’t very common at that time) And I subsequently ascertained the driver was one Elio Malocco.
findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_q … i_n9712334
These are just a few of the more obvious examples that spring to mind. There are plenty of others.
This is all based on my experiences in Dublin. If your experience in Derry was different, fair enough.
Not to drag the thread off topic but care to qualify.
What is a grasp of reality in modern terms?
well you get people saying that prices are going to go to 2001 levels , for example. i think they are wrong and take them up on it.
this is why i come here which is the what the OP wanted to know.
i brandish the sword of truth , i slice thru lies like flowers (dandelions most likely)
Well, for the sake of argument, do the kind of posts I sometimes see on here that lacerate the mores of present day Ireland, whilst glossing over or completely ignoring the sins of the past, tend to display a good grasp of reality or a good sense of perspective?
I was signed on a Bosman from AskAboutMoney.
-Rd
I’ve been living in Engerland for the last number of years, sold a house there earlier this year for a modest profit whilst relocating back here with family (1 young child) in tow.
Discovered the pin in late '06 and became fascinated with the wealth of info being provided as up to now all I was hearing was how wonderful our economy is/was.
We were looking at buying a one off home in commuterville, but knew that 300k would barely get us what we wanted back then, and 400k would be more likely what we were after. Very quickly decided to rent for a year (in a house we aspire to owning) in outlying commuterville and have recently offered to continue the lease for 3 more years (the monthly rent is half the interest on a similar place).
I’ve come to enjoy the Central Bank section strangely as the broader global economy is what worries me more than Irelands property future. In particular Peak Oil is my biggest worry - and not for the commuting reasons.
Having moved a few times in recent years (some time in the US), I am happy to up sticks and move us all to another country which can offer us a lifestyle we could enjoy - should things get significantly worse here. Of course, the nipper is my only worry, but travel broadens the mind - eh?
Working in a specialised area of IT (aren’t they all!), I remain confident that at relatively short notice, I could come up with something else in Europe should my position disappear through contacts and a willingness to travel.
So long live the pin. It’s the breath of fresh air in these ill winds of change.