This was one of my favorites



This was one of the award winning ones. I don't know if Ireland quite has the weather for these outdoor living room type gardens.



I have a lot more Bloom photos in the photo album (pw required)

I was in NY for work and as always took a number of photos. Here are some of the more interesting ones:

The Apple store in NY, wonderful flagship store, great bold architecture and some great products and technology inside:



Central park, of course:



Ground zero:

Swords Veterinary Clinic website now online, see swordsvet.com for more information.

Keelin's Karmann Ghia website is now freely accessible to all who are interested in VW Karmann Ghias. Click on the link below to browse the site: pictures on the site include the original colour of the car when imported into Ireland, pictures of performing the paint job and pictures of the car when completed. To view the site: KeelinsKarmann.com click here.

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There are serious issues with the way that Estate Agents are allowed to operate in Dublin.

We were recently interested in purchasing a house which was on the market to be sold by private treaty - note not Auction. So we offered to buy it at a value well above the asking price and asked was it accepted? The estate agent said yes but that they were going to ask around all of the other viewers to see if they wanted to beat our offer before agreeing to sell it. Why do buyers allow this? This is clearly unacceptable, we were offering a good price. Either the offer is acceptable or it is not. If the offer is not accepted, the buyer should ask: well how much DO you want for it and be allowed to negotiate a fair price. But this doesn't happen.

Note that this is not an auction - it is a private sale subject to survey and title. Therefore, what is reality of an apparent bidding war when:

1) You don't even know if there IS another party bidding, let alone who they are.

2) None of the bidders are actually legally obliged to follow through with the purchase once the "auction" ends. So they can bid until the cows come home with no intention nor obligation to buy.

This system is obviously open to serious abuse and corruption and needs to be stopped.

I think at this stage, it is a significant contributing factor to the overly inflated prices in Dublin. It is this lack of regulation that allows estate agents behavior to fuel the panic amongst buyers to such an extent that they accept it when they offer significant sums of money for a house only to be told that the offer isn't rejected but isn't accepted either. Think about it, the estate agents job is to hide information from the buyer so as to decrease their capacity to make informed decisions (Read: Freakonomics for more on this).

The estate agent basically advises the vendor to wait, that there were a lot of people at the viewing so don't accept the offer, don't negotiate with the buyer, just let a fake bidding war happen. I call it a fake bidding war because of the two reasons above. Of course the vendor loves it and some day I will be selling my house and I will love it - but that doesn't make it right.

We didn't get the house, eventually it went to sealed bids and we lost. Again, the results of the sealed bids are not disclosed. No surprise there. So we may well have had the best offer but we will never know.

Remember that the difference to the estate agent between 2 offers of a few thousand Euros in commission is very little - so they don't really care.

There is a brand new Photo Album (password protected) setup. For those of you who have the password, Click Here.

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Welcome to Cronan McNamara's site. I will be sporadically posting new and old photos, some news and my thoughts here.

I am interested in business, technology, property & architecture, travel, sport, food, motors amongst other things so be sure to come back and view the photos and posts.

Hope you like it - either way, let me know.

Cronan McNamara

Federer v Gasquet on the Centre Court of Wimbledon and we are in the front row. Federer goes on to become Champion for the fourth straight year.



Agassi on his last year to compete in Wimbledon on his way to a first round victory.