The viewing trip: a field guide.

A viewing trip is a memory experiment run in holiday conditions. By apartment nine, the terraces blur, the sun has softened your standards, and someone mentions another couple flying in Thursday. Here is how to come home with judgement intact.

Before you fly

Budget locked using the full-cost calculator, finance moving (approval in principle if borrowing), NIE application started, and the brief written down: must-haves, nice-to-haves, dealbreakers, signed by both of you. The written brief is the anchor you will be grateful for on day three. Six to eight viewings a day is the ceiling; past that you are collecting confusion.

Getting around

Hire a car. Viewings are spread along the coast and up into the hills, and a day run on taxis and someone else's timetable is a day you see less and decide worse.

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In every single apartment

Photograph the same five things in the same order: building entrance, view from the main terrace, kitchen, bathroom, and the street looking both ways. Your phone becomes a comparable database instead of 400 sunsets. Ask the same questions every time: community fees and any planned works, what stays in the sale, why the seller is selling, how long it has been listed, and (if letting matters) the licence position. Note the answers immediately: memory is the first casualty of sunshine.

The tactics to recognise

None of this is evil, it is just sales, and naming it removes its power. The worst-first tour that makes the target property shine. The other-couple-viewing-Thursday urgency. The reservation form appearing on the terrace at golden hour. “The owner would take an offer today.” Smile, enjoy the terrace, and remember every one of these works because of the deadline your flight home creates. The seller's urgency is not your urgency.

The 48-hour rule

Decide before you fly: no signature and no deposit until 48 hours after you land home. A genuinely right property survives two days of Irish weather and a spreadsheet. One that needed the sunset to close was never right, and a modest reservation after proper reflection (agreed in writing as refundable if your lawyer's checks fail, per the seven mistakes guide) loses you nothing but the pressure.

What a good trip produces

Not a purchase: a shortlist of two or three with full notes, photographs that compare like with like, answered questions, and a clear head to decide from home while your lawyer starts the checks. That is a wildly successful trip, whatever the agent's face says at the airport drop-off.