Better late than early, when it comes to buying in our market.

Our anonymous buyer is wrapping up his house hunting activities.

Just over 6 months since I started viewing houses in earnest, I’ve made the decision to stop. It’s not what estate agents want from potential buyers at this time but I feel it’s the right choice for me to make. The way I feel about it is that not buying over the last half a year has saved me a lot of money – so why stop now?

I very nearly bought at the start of 2008, convinced that anything less than the asking price was a victory for me. Five months on, I’ve recently viewed a better house two doors down from that one I nearly bought, priced 50K lower. I’m confident that if the house in between were to come on the market at the end of this year, I’d stand to make a similar saving if I were to buy it then.

So isn’t that enough: postpone rather than pull out altogether? Wait until the end of 2008 and save 100K or approximately 20% of the value of a home? Maybe not when 2009 now looks gloomy from an economic perspective and when people have started talking about the possibility of a return to the depressing 80’s again.

This is where confidence comes in. Not many people in my shoes have confidence in the market at the moment, it seems to me, and the result is that we’re hesitating. But it could be worse than that. While many involved in the Irish property industry will point to the national media’s scaremongering as a cause of this, I must add that a lot of the industry’s own commentary has not helped. Though many responsible property professionals and economists carefully judge what they say, large sections of the industry simply churn out positive opinion and tell us all the time that “now is a good time to buy” or that “things are beginning to look better”. When these assessments are then later being revised and re-revised downwards, all such comments lose all credibility and damage buyers’ perception of the entire property market.

Additionally, the property market is feeling the effects of being touted as a good investment over the last decade. For most people in this country, including many first time buyers, purchasing property is a form of speculation, not a judgement based on lifestyle and affordability. Clearly, it would be better for the market were this not the case but after so many years of emphasising the potential value of the assets we live in, it’s impossible to shift the goalposts now.

My decision is basically an admission that I don’t think I’m capable of accurately judging when the market is going to bottom out and that I no longer trust anyone to tell me when that’s about to happen. The result is that I’ll have to judge the right time to buy from historical data such as TSB/ESRI indices which will invariably be a month or so out of date. The downside of this is that I won’t get prices when they’re at their lowest as the publication of such good news will see the rapid re-entry of people like me into the market and cause prices to spike shortly after the bottom has been reached. Still, it’s better to be a couple of months late then a year or so early … in this context.

And even then, I wonder could my nerves falter for other reasons, more about the panic of it all, the frenzy. What this country needs is a calm, stable market so that buyers such as myself can act rationally based on facts and figures. I would even go so far as to suggest a moratorium by the industry on economic predictions and that it just let people get on with the business of buying and selling their homes.