Not having to pay stamp duty 'changed our way of looking at houses'

The new changes to stamp duty have put an extra €40,000 in Rosalind Beere's back pocket and injected a pep in her house-hunting step.

With €550,000 to spend, Rosalind, an economics lecturer in the National College of Ireland, and her boyfriend Cian Flood, a venture capitalist, were looking to buy in south Dublin.

Aged 30, she says she was looking to buy a home rather than a house and was not willing to live in an apartment or make the sacrifices involved in moving out to the greater Dublin area where there is a choice of new homes without the burden of stamp duty.

"I have friends living in Celbridge and Drogheda and, frankly, I don't want to live there. I don't want to end up in a house in the middle of nowhere."

The pair, however, quickly became frustrated with the shortage of houses in south Dublin in their price range and the enormous burden of stamp duty which worked out at about €40,000 on top of the price of most of the houses they were looking at.

They became "disgruntled buyers", she said.

In fact, Rosalind was so fed up with house hunting that she threw in the towel and resigned herself to long-term renting.

When stamp duty changes were announced last week it "was a huge relief, almost too good to be true", she says. "It changed our way of looking at houses and our buying potential," she says. They are now hoping to buy in the next 12 months.