The unsettled generation

Stay in the family home, buy or rent - today's twentysomethings face a dilemma in choosing where to live, writes Róisín Ingle

The latest television ad for a prominent lending institution begins with a young couple in bed making love. A lamp is turned on by a cast member from the American drama series The Sopranos revealing the young woman's mother sitting on a chair in the corner of the room watching. In the following scene the mother plonks herself on the bed between the recently interrupted couple, ramming her point home. The message, quite clearly, is get a room. A room of your own, that is.

Research shows young people are living at home longer than ever before, despite the risk of scenarios such as that described above.

Another bank ad recently showed a kissing couple in a taxi, each one reluctant to take the other home for fear their parents might be home. Accommodation is probably one of the hottest topics for the current generation.

At the launch of a new housing development in Clondalkin, Dublin, almost 10 years ago, Carol Strong, associate director of Douglas Newman Good, remembers the age profile of the eager house-buyers lining up to get their feet on the property ladder.

"They were virtually children," she recalls. "I remember one couple in particular who couldn't have been more than 20. Those were the days of 95 per cent loans when if you had 1,000 Irish pounds saved for a deposit you were in a position to buy."

Even with the abolition of stamp duty for first-time buyers these days, the biggest barrier to home ownership for people in their early to mid-20s is not the total cost of the house, says Strong's colleague Keith Lowe, but the deposit. Most people have to come up with anything from €16,000 to €30,000 before they can even think of buying. "They are being helped by their parents and coming up with the rest themselves," he says. They estimate the average age of first-time buyers is now 25.

Increasingly, many of the more than 400,000 Irish people in their early to mid-20s are opting to live at home, enduring the lack of privacy and independence for the financial saving that life with the parents inevitably brings. And while, according to Eamonn Fallon of online accommodation finder daft.ie, the attitude still prevails even among young people that rent is "dead money", more and more are seeking rental accommodation of a quality and location they could never afford to buy.

"Two-thirds of our clientele are under 30," he says, adding that New Year's Day was the busiest on the site in the eight years since it was founded. "We also facilitate first-time mortgages and have seen a huge increase in interest among our younger clientele since the abolition of the first-time buyers' grant. There was a big surge after Christmas and we are currently processing around €10 million worth of first mortgages." Buying a house may seem like a distant dream for many of the current generation, but the aspiration is no less real.

The New Owners
Cormac O'Brien 25, Musician

I had two main worries in the last couple of years; one was whether as a freelance musician I was going make it in an uncertain industry and the other was whether I would ever be able to buy a house. I just happened to have a very good working year and that allowed me to get enough money for a deposit, so we bought nine months ago in East Wall, Dublin. I kind of had the feeling that this might be the only time we would get the money together so we went for it. It feels like a big achievement - most of our friends are renting.

It is a bit scary when I think about how much we borrowed because the loan of €265,000 actually means we have to pay back €430,000 over 30 years, which is a hefty amount. I have never been in debt before and never had a bank loan. I worry about whether I will get enough work and sometimes feel like I am doing something temporarily that's not a real job, more of a hobby.

A lot of my friends trained for the IT industry and couldn't find decent jobs after college. Now they are either in crappy jobs or going back to college or leaving the country altogether. My parents are very proud that we have managed to buy. They were concerned about the price but they know there is no alternative. Now that we have bought, I am hoping the price will go up. I wasn't planning on staying in Ireland but then I got a lot of work.

We are still talking about moving to another country, mostly for the weather and for the kind of house we could afford to buy abroad.

Lynn Durie 25, Medical secretary

I can't believe we actually did it. It cost so much money and I don't have a professional career so I needed help from my Mum and Dad; Cormac saved - he is very good with money - but there is just no way I could have managed to put away what we needed for a house. I have friends who have no hope of buying. There has to be two to you to get on the property ladder, in Ireland anyway; my sister is single and living in Brussels and she is just about to buy an apartment on her own.

Buying in East Wall was a bit of a culture shock. I'm from Killiney and Cormac is from Ballsbridge - from Ailesbury Road to West Road! Our house is actually really nice but my car got vandalised and the traffic around here is terrible; it's not like buying our first gorgeous home in the exact location we wanted.

I do feel a pressure to make more money in the future - there is no prospect for promotion in my job, which is scary - and I am hoping some wonderful opportunity will come along. When we left school, the economy was booming and we all thought we were going to be rich and fall into our dream career but then you realise, hang on, I am actually going to have to do something first and it can be difficult for people my age to work out what that is.

I don't know anyone who loves their job and many of them hate what they do. I do know we are really lucky with the house because it is a big step these days, a step many of our friends couldn't even dream of making.

The Home Bird
Jean Devlin 23, Senior researcher

Apart from a few months when I was in Canada, I have always lived at home with my Mum and Dad and younger brother in Templeogue. A lot of my friends had flats in town as students, which was great, but after college many of them went back to live at home so we are all in the same boat.

I get on very well with my parents and they don't have any real input into what I do with my life but I will always text my mother to tell her whether or not I'll be home that night. At 23 that feels a bit odd.

Living at home you don't have to worry about things like household bills, but I get slagged at work for ringing home every day asking my mother what's for dinner. If it's her home-made lasagne or quiche I will go home to eat but if it's something like meat and two veg or casserole I tend to make alternative plans.

My mother does all my washing and ironing but I do a lot of other housework. I pay my parents €50 a week rent which doesn't exactly break the bank, and I suppose I could rent, but then I think of all the other things I could buy with the money. I do save though with the view of going travelling again because I have got itchy feet. I might move out in a year or so. If I do, I will definitely miss all the perks of living at home.

The Serial Renter
Harry Keogh 27, Advertising sales executive

The good thing about renting is that you can consider yourself transient; if I wanted to leave my job or Dublin tomorrow I could do it with very little hassle. Also, it's a renter's market these days so you can often find excellent accommodation with great facilities in a place you could never afford to buy.

I left home in my late teens and rented in Cork until I moved to Dublin last October. I currently rent a room in a very nice four-bedroomed house in Kimmage with two girls and a guy.

The bad thing about renting is that you are pumping money into a black hole. I have a lot of friends who have bought houses and they think I am mad because the rent I pay could go towards covering a mortgage. I have friends who bought in their early 20s with the help of their parents - it would have been absolutely impossible for them to have achieved that without help.

I do know of some people who have done it without help, starting on the very bottom of the property ladder buying some really small place and managing the mortgage repayments by renting out one of the rooms. But basically you need to be clever with money and you need to be prepared to start at the bottom. I thought I would be in Cork for the rest of my life at one stage.

Now I feel Dublin is just a pit stop to somewhere else and that will be a pit stop to somewhere else. I have been going out with my girlfriend for six years now and in my parents' day we would have been married by now. It isn't something we are planning at the moment.

I feel like I have an awful lot more to experience of the world. You would be crazy not to take advantage of opportunities to see places like South America or Asia. Having said that, some people are quite happy to try to buy the house next door to their parents and raise two point five kids but I think that the age when people start wanting to do that is 10 years further on than it used to be. If I ever was to buy property it would probably be abroad in somewhere like Bulgaria or Cyprus as an investment because it is cheaper and the rewards are greater.

I am happy enough renting because it gives me freedom, but it's a double-edged sword - you are lining someone else's pockets and paying someone else's mortgage. I am definitely not at the stage where I want a house and a south-facing garden. We have so many choices of what to do with our lives that it would be foolish not to at least consider them before we settle down.