u/Bischa081

Myself and my partner are first time buyers currently sale agreed on an apartment in Dublin. We are opting for an apartment over a house as it suits our needs in terms of location, careers, and future family planning more than a house does.

However, we have come to realize that buying an apartment comes with its own unique set of challenges. The first apartment we were sale agreed on fell through due to the management company being shady about fire safety issues.

The current apartment we think should be ok, but we have a management company that is slow with responses and has a very small surplus (however it is a very small development, so I believe it's proportionate).

As a first time buyer, the extent to which some of this warrants worrying about or not is a bit elusive to us.

I'd welcome current apartment owners' thoughts on their experience with buying (particularly in Dublin), what to know about management company behaviour and what is a red flag or not, any general thoughts and advice welcomed!

Myself and my partner have been trying to purchase our first property for over a year now. We have a max budget of about €400k and would like to be in Dublin, where we both grew up and have lived our whole lives. Neither of us have many connections to trades people, so we decided an apartment was better for us than a fixer upper house.

We first went sale agreed in August 2025. After 6 months of being sale agreed, the sale fell through due to concealment of information regarding fire safety issues.

January 2026 we went sale agreed again, even nicer than the first place so we were delighted. Now in May, it's starting to look like we may encounter the same issues. We are both exhausted from the ups and downs and from saving tightly and keeping our accounts in top shape for about a year. Should this current sale fall through and we need to go back to the market for the third time, we feel we really need even a week away, nothing extravagant, but some sun in Europe.

Obviously this would require dipping into the savings even a little bit or saving less that month.

Would this set us back and require us to restart 6 months of clean savings all over again?