When we arrived in Waterford in 1998 and decided we wanted to own a home of our own there, we set out to find one the way any couple of Americans would set out to buy a house. We dropped by a real estate agent's office in the center of Waterford City. We sat down with Mr. O'Shea and gave him the rundown on the kind of house we were looking for. Georgian, stone, at least three bedrooms and three baths, with a bit of land for a garden, and maybe an old barn for a pony. Mr. O'Shea seemed to take our criteria under advisement and suggested a time later in the week when one of his agents could show us available properties.

That first day out, we saw four houses, not one of which in any way fit the description we'd given to Mr. O'Shea in his office. Instead, his agent kept taking us to see new-built “bungalows” in “estates,” as the Irish refer to the suburban housing subdivisions that were popping up all across the country when we arrived on the scene. Kathleen refused to get out of the car to walk through the fourth place. It looked just like the three we'd already seen and that we'd already explained weren't anything like what we were interested in buying.

The Celtic Tiger was an established economic phenomenon by the time we took up residence in Waterford, and the better part of the money that boom was throwing off was being plowed into real estate—building it, buying it, selling it, one Irishman to another. Dozens of the housing estates of the kind Mr. O'Shea's team was so intent on introducing to us were being developed across the Emerald Isle in what was the start of what proved to be one of biggest Ponzi schemes in history. Over the next seven years that we lived in Ireland, the real estate market in this country continued up and up and up. It was a self-fueling spiral.

This chaotically expanding Irish marketplace of the late 1990s was our introduction to shopping for real estate in a foreign country. It took us months to begin to realize even how much we didn't know what we didn't know. We'd like to save you the frustration and the confusion that we suffered as we felt our way through that first purchase in Ireland and other early property buys. Here, therefore, is how you buy real estate overseas, in eight easy steps.