Turn it down

The obvious alternative is simply to turn down the AH offer unless you are 100% sure you are happy to pay the money for the home offered, and understand and accept the terms and conditions attached. The market is heading towards becoming affordable by itself.

Negotiate with the developer directly

If you like the property, but not the AH terms, then consider approaching the developer with an offer somewhere between the market price and the AH price. This is really only worth doing if you can see yourself there long term, but maybe just not for 20 years. If you are not embarrased by your first offer, you are offering too much. There are deals to be done, and some peoples' situations mean they do not always have the luxury of waiting it out.

Rent

Renting is a dirty word in Ireland. A well-intentioned, but ill worded revamp of renting legislation means that the current landlord laws benefit neither a good tenant nor a good landlord. The Private Residential Tenancies Board (PRTB) is both unreasonably biased towords problem tenants, and unreasonably slow in making decisions to make it an effective and timely way of resolving problems that arise in rental situations.

Because of this, renting is often a fly-by-night operation in Ireland. A bad experience with an irresponsible landlord would test anybody's patience with renting and send them running to the nearest credit union to borrow a fake deposit for a house. The whole system here is very open to abuse, and compares very unfavourably when compared to our continental cousins. Renting is a perfectly acceptable and widely adopted way of putting a roof over your head in mainland Europe, and many people live their whole lives without buying a property.

However, to borrow an oft-used phrase, it is not all "doom-and-gloom" in the rental market in Ireland. Plenty of people rent happily and have a great relationship with their landlord. The landlord is happy to have good tenants and keeps rent reasonable to retain them etc.

Saving

Now might be a good opportunity to sit back, keep a cool head, and take a closer look at some of the deposit interest rates being offered by various banks. Rates like this have not been seen for a long time. Banks are desperate to fill their coffers to balance their leveraging in relation to loans secured against property or property developers. It's a good time to save. It's a good time to have cash when buying a property. It's an easy decision if you are not in a rush to buy a home. It would be a great shame if saving was discouraged in this country, considering the success of the highly touted SSIA scheme. Get saving while the going is good !