"starter Homes"

The Waterside apartment at Charlotte Quay, Ringsend Road, Dublin 4, is one of seven apartment complexes which has been built in the Ringsend/Irishtown area of Dublin in the past 12 years. And if you are a typical first-time buyer with little more than £110,000 to spend on your first home, a one-bed apartment in one of these blocks is about the only property in the area you will be able to afford. Still, if you have your heart set on buying one of the redbrick turn-of-the-century houses that attract so many people to the area, living in an apartment nearby, while you save up, might appeal to you.

No 170 Waterside is one such apartment. The third-floor apartment is a well-maintained, standard, modern apartment of about 450 sq ft: it has a reasonably-sized livingroom overlooking a nicely-landscaped courtyard; a galley kitchen at one end of the sittingrom; a double bedroom with a fitted wardrobe and bathroom with a tiled floor and part-tiled walls. It is for sale through Bennetts of Sandymount for £110,000-plus.

At the end of a corridor, it is right next door to a large roof garden, with loads of space for sunbathing. There is underground car-parking at no extra cost, and electronic entrance gates. The service charge is £500 a year.

The Waterside, built five years ago, has a roughly 50/50 mix of owner-occupied and rented apartments; over half of its 205 apartments are one-beds. One of its most attractive aspects is the walk along the quayside at the rear of the complex - a waterside walk that takes you up to Millennium Tower, part of the Charlotte Quay Dock development next door to the Waterside.

Prices for apartments vary a little in the neighbourhood: one-beds in Fitzwilliam Quay, on the far side of the hump-backed bridge that leads to Ringsend, start at £120,000, according to Ken MacDonald of letting agents Hooke & MacDonald. Prices in Millennium Tower, aimed very much at the top end of the market, are around £250,000 to £350,000 for extralarge apartments. Camden Lock apartments, built right at the bridge 12 years ago, are larger than more recently-built homes, and command higher prices - about £165,000 for two-beds, according to Anna Rossi of Sherry FitzGerald. And although schemes like such as Fisherman's Wharf, at the bottom of Thorncastle Road, looking on to a quayside, were initially slower to sell, this is no longer the case, according to agents.

A short stroll from the Waterside is 7 Howard Street, a well-maintained single-storey two-bed house also for sale through Bennetts for £148,000. Right in the heart of the area of Ringsend known as South Lotts, off the South Lotts Road, Number 7 has a comfortable livingroom with a mahogany fireplace, a small double and a single bedroom, a good-sized kitchen with a well-fitted-out bathroom off it, and a small but very private and sunny back yard.

New owners may well decide to remove the partition between the small front hall and livingroom to make a large, open-plan downstairs area; they could also create a larger back yard by taking away a shed. But that said, 7 Howard Street is just the kind of property that so many young buyers want, and is in good condition.

The yuppification of Irishtown/Ringsend began over a decade ago, and it's not hard to see why. Like Stoneybatter and the Liberties, very similar areas, it has the same mix of turn-of-the-century cottages and Coronation-Street style two-up/two-down redbricks, as well as being within walking distance of town. But the days when you could snap up one of these much sought-after homes for even £70,000 is a distant memory. The minimum price for houses in the area now appears to be about £135,000, for which you might get a 450 sq ft two-bed cottage needing refurbishment. £135,000 to £150,000 is pretty much the minimum price of a two-bed apartment in the area as well. Those of you who have wondered how much newer corporation houses along Sean Moore Road - dubbed "Legoland" by some locals - cost will not be much cheered. Nigel Bennett of Bennetts says they rarely come on the market; he sold a four-bed there just over a year ago for £126,000.

Demand in Irishtown and Ringsend continues to outstrip supply, especially for the houses, and not surprisingly, quite a few of these properties are now sold at auction. For example, Sherry FitzGerald sold a house on Gordon Street, in South Lotts, for £138,000 at auction three weeks ago - it had a guide of £115,000. Signs in P J O'Dwyer's recently-opened estate agency in the busy cluster of shops just beyond the library on Irishtown Road in Ringsend tell the story: "Cottage needed urgently. Thinking of selling? Contact us first - we have a number of serious loanapproved purchasers."

The area, very much one of Dublin's urban villages, is being profoundly affected by the sale of houses to "outsiders", as well as by the addition of 700 to 800 apartments over the past decade. And change is continuing apace. A new apartment development being built by Morrison Homes on the site of an old meat plant on Thorncastle Road - near the Fisherman's Wharf development - is due to be launched towards the end of this year. And developer Zoe proposes to build a massive development at the old gasometer site, just behind South Lotts. The building of the new Barrow Street DART station will serve to make the area even more desirable. Despite all this change, Irishtown and Ringsend have a character all their own. Walk around the area on a sunny afternoon, and there are older women out on the footpath, scrubbing vigorously, neighbours sunning themselves on window sills, chatting to each other. As in East Wall, these are self-sufficient communities, even though they are only 20 to 30 minutes walk from O'Connell Bridge.

And although "outsiders" have been making the area their home for years, it would be a mistake to assume that you can buy into a warm sense of community along with the price of your redbrick. One "blow-in" who recently sold a house there says that outsiders are not welcomed by long-term residents, who understandably have very different concerns than the newcomers.