The phone has been busy lately. Busier than any month this year. And the calls tend to fall into two camps - different people, different stages, same underlying gap.

Usually international. They've been saving properties on Daft from a kitchen table somewhere in the US or mainland Europe. They've done the reading. They've got the budget. They're ready.

Except they're not.

The first thing I usually hear is something like: "We've found a few we love - we just need to know how to make an offer." And I have to slow the conversation down, because what they're describing is the end of a process they haven't started yet.

I walk them through what buying in Ireland actually looks like. The agent works for the seller. Asking prices are often set low to generate competition, not to reflect value. Sale agreed doesn't mean sold - either side can still walk away. Conveyancing averages 100 days. The rhythm here is completely different to what most people expect.

By the end of the call, most of them are quieter than when they started. That's not a bad sign. That's recalibration. And recalibrated is exactly where you need to be before you spend a cent in this market.

These calls are harder.

Six months in. Twelve months (or more). Doing it alone. They've lost properties. Been outbid. Gone sale agreed on something and watched it unravel. The energy in their voice is different - not excitement, not frustration. Something flatter. They're worn down.

I'm hearing more of this right now. And I think it reflects two things happening beneath the surface that most buyers don't see coming.

The first is build costs. Someone falls for a property that needs work. They budget a renovation in their head - a number they've cobbled together from a conversation with a friend or a quick search online. They go sale agreed. Then they get proper quotes.

The quotes bear almost no resemblance to the number they had in mind. I always tell people: budget pessimistically and leave room for a nice surprise. That's a far better position than blind optimism and a back-of-the-hand figure you cooked up because you thought it would be plenty. Deals collapse not because the buyer changed their mind about the house - but because the house changed its mind about their budget.

The second is legal delays. Contracts are taking longer to be issued. Solicitors go quiet for weeks. Nobody explains why. And for a buyer managing a rental deadline, a relocation timeline, or a chain, every month of silence costs real money. Depending on the property and the area, that's anywhere from €4,000 to €15,000 a month in rent - money that was earmarked for the deposit, quietly bleeding away while you wait for a contract that nobody can tell you when to expect. I am seeing a lot of this in the market and have done for some time but it appears to be getting worse if I am honest.

Neither of these things is visible the day you go sale agreed. They arrive after. Quietly. And by then you're emotionally committed to a property that's financially unravelling underneath you.

I used a phrase recently that stuck: giving someone access to the market without preparing them is like handing them a fast car without a driving lesson (clip above). They'll get there faster. But faster towards the wrong outcome is not progress.

The buyers I'm talking to right now who are struggling - they're not careless people. They're sharp, motivated, and they moved quickly because the market told them to. They went sale agreed without getting the renovation priced properly. They assumed conveyancing would take weeks. They treated sale agreed as a finish line.

The system didn't prepare them. And nobody along the way said: slow down. Check the foundations. Make sure the ground beneath this decision is solid before you build on it.

It’s not a character flaw in the buyer. It's a gap in the process. And it's the gap I spend most of my time working in.

This week's takeaway: If you're about to start, get educated before you get excited. If you've been at it and nothing's sticking, don't search harder - stop long enough to ask whether the machinery underneath your search is built for what this market demands. The fast car isn't the problem. Knowing how to drive it is.