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Is there a higher marketing spend on selling apartments?

Gabrielle Monaghan

Modern apartment life – a staple of existence in continental European cities such as Vienna and Paris since the second half of the 19th century – is a relatively recent phenomenon in Ireland. Here, the humble ‘flat’ has traditionally been viewed as the poor relation to suburban houses.

That trend began to change during the Celtic Tiger years, when developers began flogging apartments to the newly affluent, using marketing materials which promised an aspirational lifestyle – only for those aspirations to be dashed by the property crash. Between 2002 and 2016, about 15pc of homes built in Ireland were apartments.