SeattleTimes.nwsource.com:
Mary Holleran was dumbstruck in 2000 when developers paid her $50,000 for the cottage where she was born in 1916. Her family considered the falling-down wreck of so little value they had been using it for decades as a cowshed. But now the cottage is the elegantly restored home of a Jaguar-driving Dublin advertising executive and is worth well over $500,000.
‘These places were thought to be worthless in my time,’ said Holleran, 90, looking across a green field in the west of Ireland to the country cottage where she was born. ‘We were only counting the pennies then, but everybody has enough money now.’
Tracing the country’s spectacular rise from scenic basket case to economic powerhouse, Ireland’s storied green fields are now among the most sought-after in Europe. The property boom has reached from one end of the island to the other, with home values on average soaring by 270% in the last decade, according to the government, one of the world’s fastest rates. The average Irish house now goes for about $450,000; in Dublin, the capital, the figure exceeds $600,000.
In the United States, prices rose only 57% in about 10 years by a somewhat different measure, the median price of a single-family house, according to the National Association of Realtors. The figure of $147,100 at the end of 1996 had increased to $231,200 by this July, it reports.
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