Sunday, September 03, 2006

The pull of the land

It's worth looking at this Saturday Washington Post article about the Irish property market if only for the picture of the fabulous renovation job done on a Galway farm cottage. But the picture is not typical of the scenes accurately described in the article: bungalow blight in the countryside and awfully designed and built housing estates in the Dublin suburbs. It also notes the frenzy of interest in owning property overseas, which has long since extended beyond traditional Spanish locales to the EU accession countries, Africa, and Asia. Cultural explanations for this tendency are commonplace e.g. from the owner of the above cottage

He noted that a century ago, when Ireland was under British rule, Irish were tenants on this land, not owners. Now, he said, many Irish own not one, but two homes.

Hard to tell whether this is an actual explanatory factor, or if it just sounds good. It does leave Ireland poorly diversified if global property markets take a hit.

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