On the move

FIONA REDDANon the hunt for a family home

SO IT’S now almost two months into the house search and maybe it’s time to sit back and reflect on our progress – or lack thereof. Over the past eight weeks or so we have: viewed 15-plus houses; bid on one house; got one mortgage approved; and bought zero houses.

Looking for a new home is undoubtedly exciting but it’s also a bit of a head-wreck.

Weekdays are spent checking alerts from Myhome.ieor Daft.ie, eyeing up potential propositions, checking the price of similar homes in the area on the price register, and running the property by friends who already live nearby.

You see something that might be a possibility and before you can help yourself, you’ve pictured yourself living there.

You’ve seen yourself having a drink in the garden on a summer evening, your curtains on that window, your dining table in that kitchen, even the kids next door playing with your kids (lucky escape for those kids so far).

Saturday mornings are spent in a whirl of house viewings, or flash viewings, because with estate agent staff numbers slashed, they only run for half an hour and frequently start late as agents are running in from previous appointments.

But by Saturday evening much of this anticipation will have dissipated into a sense of despondency. The garden was too small, it was north facing, there were cracks in the ceiling, the neighbour’s house was a tip, it was too noisy, too close to the main road and decrepit.

Too fussy, you say? Quite possibly, but when you’re looking for a home for your children to grow up in, and when you’ve borne the brunt of buying at the peak of the market, you don’t want to make the same mistakes again.

But time to deliberate might not be on our side. With mortgage interest relief set to expire at the end of the year, there is a palpable sense of expediency in the air.

On the plus side, this means that there has been a little surge in the number of houses coming onto the market, as vendors see an opportunity to sell.

On the downside, it seems that people are now more inclined to come off the fence and start bidding.

So if it’s time to get moving, at least we have learned the following about house-hunting:

At some point in the process, you will wish you were looking for a house somewhere other than in Dublin. Like Longford. Every alert I get seems to contain a newly built detached four-bed in its own grounds in that county: for less than €200,000.

Your dream house is out there – if you could just manage to come up with another €100,000. I often wonder whether people with more to spend feel the same as I do – if you have a budget of €1 million is it the house on at €1.2 million that you crave?

Many of the houses you come across are already sale-agreed. In this uncertain market, agents are leaving those “For sale” signs up for longer until the deal is almost signed. So save time and ring the agent straight away if you’re interested.

On the other hand, just because it’s sale-agreed doesn’t mean it’s sold. Even though one agent recently remarked that this was a “very rare occurrence”, in my experience it’s not. We have viewed several houses which have come back on the market after previously falling through: in one case the agent said that the buyers were moving to Cork instead while another said the buyers’ finance fell through.

The house that was off the market before you even got to see it will become your “perfect house” and, despite never setting foot in it, it will rightly or wrongly inform many of your later decisions.

“No, I couldn’t consider this house because the other one’s garden was much bigger,” you’ll hear yourself say, without ever having even seen it.

And on the subject of gardens, bear in mind that it will never be as lengthy as it looks online. Maybe there’s some estate agent app I’m not aware of that lengthens the shot, but we have trekked off to see some houses just on the basis of the gardens. And that photo pretty much always lies.

Don’t go to a viewing without doing a drive-by first. While you can get carried away looking at photos and the estate agent’s spin online, simply driving past the house can offer a much-needed sense of realism. How close is it to public transport? What do the neighbours’ houses look like? Is it on a busy road? How misleading are the photos?

No-one knows exactly where the bottom of a housing market is, so disregard agents confidently telling you so. Maybe it’s already been and gone, or maybe we have yet to reach it, we’ll only know in time. But if you are inclined to buy into Time magazine’s tale of a “Celtic Comeback” or the recent hikes in the CSO property price index, remember that there are plenty of naysayers still out there.

UK investment magazine Money Morning recently warned its readers to stay away from Irish property, arguing that the new Insolvency Law might send prices down further.

And finally, everyone will tell you that “you’ll know it when you see it”. Here’s hoping.