Steve Symes is the perfect guide to finding a home off the beaten track. Because that is where he lives himself.

His directions to the headquarters of his unique estate agency, Green Valley Properties - also his home - are precise. Beyond the village of Bodyke, about half an hour's drive from Limerick city on the road to Scariff, you pass the sign for the East Clare Golf Course, turn right after a quarter mile on to a small road, and stay on that for 1.1 miles until you see his distinctive blue and green Green Valley sign in a hedge.

Two hundreds yards to the left, down a single-car track, you're there. His home/office is an extended cottage in a peaceful clearing in a wooded field. Wild roses crawl over an outbuilding, and he has created a lawn, with a football net (he has three children), in front of the house. On the far side of the path is a vegetable garden. The summer air hums with insects. Four hours later, crawling through another Dublin rush hour, you begin to look longingly through his extensive list of rural properties.

Symes is an estate agent with a difference, who specialises in finding and selling remote rural properties in Co Clare and south Galway, and is proud of his "brutal honesty" in describing them. A quick glance at his list shows that he is not kidding: here, for example, is a house in Rynabrone, Kylebrack, Loughrea, Co Galway, for £17,000: "Old stone built cottage in need of comprehensive refurbishment with outbuildings on circa 2 acres. In secluded, some might say remote, location in Sliabh Aughty mountains. No electricity. Spring well on site. One for the `Back to the Land' enthusiast."

A few houses down the list is another derelict stone built cottage "now a house-shaped pile of stones shrouded in ivy" in a beautiful secluded hilly location, for £19,000. Or two miles from the village of Broadford, Co Clare, is a cottage on half an acre in a beautiful hilly location for £25,000 but "access at present is very poor for the last half-mile, the road having suffered storm damage . . . not driveable except for the adventurous . . . Council have promised repairs".

This honesty does not desert him as he moves on to bigger properties: for £35,000, you might be tempted by "a little gem" in Tulla, Co Clare: "Eighteenth or nineteenth century cut limestone gate lodge, with four pillars, similar in style if not in size to Ennis courthouse". Offered for sale with approximately three-quarters of an acre, the property "not occupied since the 1960s, requires comprehensive refurbishment and almost certainly a large extension".

The plain-spoken, unglossy list is itself a delight, conjuring up far better than the usual flowery estate agentese the pleasures - as well as the pitfalls - of its properties.

Many of his descriptions include that catch-all phrase "needing comprehensive refurbishment", but Symes is characteristically blunt in explaining what he means: it could mean "no electricity, corrugated tin roof, maybe a spring well".

In what other auctioneer's list would you find a property described as "somewhat Findhornian"? (This is a £20,000 stone cottage near Caher, Co Clare, which includes a hexagonal sleeping shed and a vibrant organic garden.) And this gives a clue to Green Valley's origins, for Symes is a member of East Clare's thriving "alternative" community, who became an auctioneer pretty much by accident, about eight years after moving to live in Feakle, Co Clare.

A tall, lanky Englishman, originally from Dorset, he doesn't like the word "alternative" to describe his kind of lifestyle, but it will have to serve, since we can't agree on another description. A former teacher (and a founder member of the Cooleenbridge Steiner Waldorf School in Tuamgraney, Co Clare), he first made a living here as a professional puppeteer with Dandelion Puppets, a street theatre company which toured Ireland. Then he divorced, and wanted to sell his Feakle home. But he found selling it and buying another one through local agents difficult. So he advertised and sold his first home, then bought his new home in Caherhurley, Bodyke, from a Yorkshireman.

A neighbouring farmer wondered "who sold you that house", for he had been trying to sell an old property for a long time. Symes advertised it privately for him and sold it within six weeks. The neighbour had a relative who also wanted help selling a house, and suddenly Symes found a new career opening up. He got his auctioneer's licence in short order and set up his business 12 years ago with a list that included only eight properties.

Now he has between 100 and 150 on his books, ranging in price from £12,000 to £350,000, and his Green Valley signs dot the byroads of East Clare. The nerve centre of this operation is his office at the side of his house in the woods. It is dominated by a detailed ordnance survey map of the Clare/south Galway area, with a red dot marking his remote townland.

People selling their houses obviously have no difficulty with Symes' direct approach: he gets properties - between 12 to 20 news ones a month - and especially the kind of remote properties that can be so hard to find through mainstream agents, mainly through word of mouth, and by placing a small ad in the Clare Champion for two weeks in February. His buyers are both local and foreign - he advertises in an eclectic range of titles, from the World of Property magazine to alternative publications like Kindred Spirit and Positive News, as well as in the Irish Post, where he has a standing ad - returning emigrants looking for properties are a strong part of his market. The market in his area "has changed in a major way" since he began. "There's been a sea change in what indigenous folk look for. Five years ago, "remote" was bought by English people and continentals, or half-Irish, half-foreign couples. There was no demand from the local market for old cottages. But now local people are prepared to travel further to their work, and demand is coming from people in Limerick city, Ennis, Shannon and East Clare." However, for the really remote - he points to that house in Rynabrone in the Sliabh Aughty mountains - the buyers are still almost exclusively "blow-ins".

Prices, of course, have changed too: in 1980/81, you could buy four acres and a ruin for around £3,250, he says. Now, that would cost at least 10 times that amount.

Most people he sells to are looking for homes to live in full-time, not holiday homes. He prefers it that way too, although he has no problem selling a house to someone looking for a holiday hideaway. But he has seen the damage that rural depopulation has had on local communities, and is a keen believer in initiatives like Kilbaha's rural resettlement scheme. When he first came to Clare, he wondered how locals would take to someone from Dublin, Dorset or Dusseldorf moving in beside them - and found they were delighted to see smoke coming out of the chimney of a long deserted cottage.

He is a good ad for living in the area: driving through it, he points out, you would never know about thriving local enterprises like East Clare Tele Cottage and Network News, or about festivals like one just finished in Mountshannon, which attracted jazz flautist Brian Dunning. If it's lonely in winter, he is only half-an-hour's drive from Limerick, Ennis, and not much more from Galway. There are drawbacks - lack of public transport means that children need a lot of chauffeuring if they are involved in local activities. But on balance, he doesn't believe there is any contest between this kind of rural peace and urban hassle.

He has also had plenty of time and experience to understand rural sensitivites about land matters like rights of way, and he is well able to negotiate around them.

The only problem with Green Valley Properties is that it doesn't have branches all over the country. If you want to visit, make an appointment - and make sure to ask for directions.

Green Valley Properties is at 061-921498.