Q&A

Your questions answered

Selling the family home

Following the death of my mother and, according to her instructions, I and my three siblings are selling the family home in Dublin and dividing the proceeds. I live abroad and came home earlier this month to help sort out getting an agent etc. There is now a major disagreement over the sale. The bottom line is that the house needs a good deal of work before it reaches its potential (i.e. gets the best price). Very little has been done to it since the mid 1970s and it looks to my mind very dilapidated. Two of my siblings just want to put in on the market as is and be done with it, another has really no opinion and I think we should spend maybe €5,000 on it at least as we will certainly recoup it two-fold in a higher price. We have until September so any guidance would be appreciated.

You are right that presenting a house in the best light gets the best price. But in your situation there are other factors. Your siblings might, for emotional reasons, not feel up to doing work on the house. Is there a possibility that they feel hurt by your insinuation that the house your mother was living in was dilapidated? If they were going in and out of the house, visiting your mother, they might be so familiar with the house they don't see its faults. Or they may have a better handle on the property market than you have. If you live in parts of the UK where property takes longer to sell, you might not realise that houses in poor condition but in good areas of Dublin sell well and quickly. Put aside the money: your aim in this is to come out the other end of this difficult process with your relationships with your siblings intact. The number one rule about getting a house ready for sale is not to call the decorators in. Instead it's to clean it thoroughly from top to bottom, tidy the garden and get rid of surplus furniture, net curtains, nick nacks, personal effects, broken garden furniture, etc. At an executors sale, viewers typically don't expect to see a mod con filled home that's in walk-in condition.

Problem with parking

A problem has arisen in my apartment block to do with parking. When it was built, there was unassigned parking, which wasn't a problem as six years ago most of the people who lived here were renters who didn't have cars. Now several apartments have sold to owner-occupiers, more renters have cars and, basically the situation is chaos and often I can't find a space even though there is one space assigned per apartment with (some) visitor parking. Is there anything that can be done?

Parking in apartment blocks can be a huge problem which is why many blocks have put in strict systems involving sticker permits that have to be displayed on windscreens, clamps and rigidly assigned parking slots. Contact your board of management about your concerns. Implementing assigned parking - painting apartment numbers on spaces - is simple enough, although it will require the consent of all apartment owners and there might be some issues involving which space should be assigned to which apartment. People will want a space close to where they live.

Send your queries to Property Questions, The Irish Times, 10-16 D'Olier Street, Dublin 2 or e-mail propertyquestions@irish-times.ie.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to respond to all questions. The above is a representative sample of queries received. This column is a readers' service and is not intended to replace professional advice. No individual correspondence will be entered into.