See you got the ball rolling before me Investy.

Merkat. One area where my post and Investy's may appear to contradict each other is with reference to paying a high proportion of purchase price up front. There is a risk that any developer goes bust and this needs factored into your calculations. It isn't easy finding opportunities with genuiine discounts (don't beleive the literature in large Email distributions made my agents and property sites.) But consider this:

Buy apartment for 100k Euros. 30k up front followed by 70k at completion.
Buy same apartment for 60k Euros. 50k up front with 10k at completion.

Which would you rather do? The answer lies in your assessment of the risk of developer going bust.

Such opportunities are hard to find. You will need to do some serious leg work to find them and be bold enough to negotiate hard. Some on hear may think that it isn't possible as they know % profit made by developers can be very low. However, the % profit they make varies from country to country and where there are larger profit margins there may be more scope for healthy discounts. I know one or two people that have succeeded in doing this, though time will tell if it proved a good decision (properties won't be complete for another couple of years - time for a developer to go bust.)