The whole home-buying process in Ireland, explained. And the tools to get through it.
Homebuyer Ready is a complete guide to buying a home in Ireland, eighty-three chapters that take you from working out your deposit to the year after you get the keys. It is written as a book, it lives here as a website, and it gets reviewed and updated as rates, rules and schemes change.
Know what a home is really worth before you bid
Put in an address, or paste a Daft or MyHome link, and you get a full report on that specific house in about twenty seconds.
It pulls what genuinely similar homes nearby have actually sold for, adjusted for size, bedrooms, BER and condition, and builds a value range and a sensible bid range from that evidence rather than from the asking price.
It also gives you the full monthly cost once you add energy, Local Property Tax and insurance on top of the mortgage, an estimate of what the work would cost at whatever standard you want it finished to, how much direct sun the garden gets through the year, and the planning applications, schools, transport, flood risk and broadband nearby.
Every free account gets one full report. Membership takes the limit off, so you can run one on every house you are considering and compare them properly.
Eighty-three chapters, in the order you will actually meet them
Most information about buying a home in Ireland is scattered across lender sites, government pages, forums and whatever an estate agent tells you on the phone. The guide puts the whole thing in one place, in the order it happens, so you are reading about surveys when you need a survey rather than trying to work out what you should have done three months ago.
Start here
Where you are today, the whole journey in order, and what to do in the next 7 days.
Getting ready
Mortgage-ready in six months, your credit record, the deposit, and what you can actually borrow.
The mortgage
Approval, broker or bank, fixed vs variable, overpaying, protection, fixer-uppers and self-builds.
Government schemes
Help to Buy, First Home Scheme, Local Authority Home Loan, vacant property and SEAI grants.
Finding a home
Researching properly, the Letter Trick for off-market, handling agents, and viewing with a sharp eye.
Buying it
Bidding without overpaying, sale agreed, solicitors, surveys, boundaries and the full cost.
Types of purchase
New build, second-hand, leasehold, auction, first-time-buyer status and special situations.
After the purchase
Selling, switching, just got the keys, making your home work for you, and when things go wrong.
Tools and templates
The checklists, letters, trackers and calculators that go with each stage.
The bigger picture
How the Irish market got here, renting versus buying, timing, and common mistakes.
Special cases
Apartments, insurance, negotiation, your buying team, self-build, BER, fraud, rural buying and self-employed income.
A book that goes out of date is worse than no book at all
Mortgage rates move. Government schemes get changed, extended and withdrawn. Lending rules get rewritten. A guide printed two years ago will confidently tell you things that are no longer true, and you have no way of knowing which parts.
This one is reviewed and updated as things change. When a rate moves or a scheme is altered, the chapter that covers it gets corrected, and the version you are reading is the corrected one.
The guide tells you what to do. These help you do it.
Reading about how to work out a maximum bid is one thing. Working out your maximum bid on the actual house you are standing outside is another. So the guide comes with the tools to do the second part.
Property reports
Full reports on any address in Ireland. Sold prices nearby, a value range, a bid range, the real monthly cost, what the work would cost and how much sun the garden gets.
OpenLive mortgage rates
Current rates from every Irish lender, filtered by rate type, term and BER.
OpenCalculators
Deposit builder, mortgage switcher, renovation costs, the First Home Scheme, and trading up or down.
OpenMarket data
Sold prices and market activity for any area in Ireland.
OpenProperty tracker and bidding log
Every house you are considering in one place, with the viewings, the notes and every bid recorded, so you are not comparing six viewings from memory.
OpenChecklists
For viewings, for surveys and for the legal process, so nothing gets forgotten at the point where forgetting it costs money.
OpenAsk Homebuyer Ready
Ask a question in plain English and get an answer drawn from the guide. It is not an adviser and it does not replace your solicitor, your broker or your surveyor. It is a faster way of finding the part of the guide that answers you.
OpenEverything else that comes with it
Member sessions
Live sessions on the parts people get stuck on, with questions taken on the night. Members can watch back afterwards.
Podcasts
Conversations with brokers, solicitors, surveyors, engineers and buyers who have recently been through it.
Templates
The letters, forms and documents you end up needing, already written, so you are not starting from a blank page at the worst possible moment.