Property

My 14-month hunt for a home to rent: The bedrooms were mouldy, the couches filthy

Months of searching, queuing ... my experience is all too common

‘Entire properties are much harder to come by than rooms.’ Photograph: Alan Betson

Glen Murphy's face
Glen Murphy
Sat Apr 2 2022 - 06:00

Renting in Ireland has become the bane of many lives. Given the precarious nature of renting, there is little feeling of security with most tenancies, even after signing on the dotted line. What you can pay €750 a month for in Berlin or Eindhoven is far removed from what the same money will get you in Dublin or Cork.

I spent most of my 20s looking for rental accommodation in Dublin, both single rooms and entire properties in the hope of sharing with friends. It was invariably a long, drawn-out and immensely frustrating process before I eventually found a decent place to lay my head.

I got lucky with my first place after college. It was a tiny shoebox room in a nice flat with two others not far from the city centre on the north side. In 2017, the rent was €425 a month excluding bills. It had risen to €470 when I left about 18 months later. At the time I was searching for my first job in journalism and so I worked full time in a restaurant to pay for it.

First thing every morning, we checked the Daft property website. We called estate agents ... follow-up emails mostly went unanswered

Entire properties are much harder to come by than rooms. Several years ago two friends and I spent about 12 months looking for a three-bed house we could afford in Dublin, anywhere inside the M50. We sent hundreds of emails, were selected for a handful of viewings and attended all of them. Most places were far more run down than the ads led us to believe.

READ MORE

One place in Cabra seemed good on first impressions. Nice sitting room, modern kitchen, fresh paint. Then we went upstairs.

Bedroom number one was a closet with a mattress and a shelf. Number two was bigger but riddled with damp in one corner that was half-concealed behind the bed. Number three was big, the width of the house, with built-in wardrobes. I slid a wardrobe door back and found a bathtub. Not a spare fitting that was being temporarily stored there, but a plumbed-in bathtub with a drain and no taps.

Glen Murphy

The estate agent who was waiting downstairs was almost as surprised as we were when we told him. The three of us ended up living separately.

Fast forward to 2020 and I’d moved home from my most recent rented room to sit out the worst (we hoped) of Covid. This had been a room in a Celtic Tiger Special (CTS).

A CTS is – based on my experience – a development, usually an apartment block, built cheaply and quickly during the boom of the early 2000s with cheap materials. Features generally include paper-thin walls, electric radiators in every room, a smallish shared living/kitchen space, thin windows, little to no heat or noise insulation. A number of these developments have been found to be dangerously lacking in fire-safety measures, and owners have been left with significant repair costs.

When a friend moved back to Ireland during 2020, we decided to begin looking for a two-bed rental in Dublin in January 2021. We were both keen to avoid random house shares again.

First thing every morning, we checked the Daft property website. We called estate agents once or twice a week checking if they had anything suitable that had not yet been listed online. Follow-up emails mostly went unanswered.

There were typically less than a dozen affordable listings online at a time, with most two-beds starting at €1,500 a month.

The supposed exodus of people from the cities due to remote working had not materialised to offer up more or cheaper rental properties like we had hoped. Calls to viewings were rare, roughly a dozen in 14 months.

The effects of the country's housing crisis are taking a detrimental toll on peoples' self-esteem

One open viewing for a place in Drumcondra was particularly mobbed. I arrived 30 minutes early and there were already 20 people waiting at the gate. By the time we could see inside the place, there were roughly 250 people in the line. People of all ages: families, students, young professionals. The many faces of Ireland’s housing crisis.

The agent allowed us each about five minutes to run in and out to view the place. We were advised to make a follow up application by sending an email – answering questions on a form they handed us as we left – along with references, payslips and PPS numbers.

How can agents make a decision on potential tenants in a situation like that?

We went to another open viewing of a two-bed second-floor apartment on the northside by the coast. A handful of people were there and we queued up by the door.

We chatted and shared our experiences of flat hunting. One man and his family were floating between friends and family members’ houses while looking for a place; others had travelled there on trains or buses from Wicklow and Louth. One couple had just arrived in Ireland thinking the rental situation “couldn’t really be that bad”.

An hour past the viewing time and we called the office of the estate agent.

“Oh, that viewing’s been cancelled, did the agent in charge not contact you?” came the response. This was in spite of calling the day before to confirm the viewing was going ahead.

'What did you think?' asked the agent when we went back outside. 'The front door should've stayed locked,' one of the other viewers said

We all returned at the same time the following day for another chance to see it and still left disappointed. At least 50 people had turned up. The agent told us that she hadn’t been inside the property yet. Myself and two others went in first and almost wretched at the smell of damp and stale cooking, even through our masks.

The carpet was almost worn through to the baseboards. The bedrooms were filthy. Thick dust covered most surfaces, large mould stains dotted the mattresses and couches. The bathroom was right out of the 1970s, with once luminous green tiles and plastic bath and sink faded to a pale shade.

The outdoor space was a covered balcony, complete with a broken chair and a filthy microwave plugged into an extension lead with thick mould growing inside.

“What did you think?” asked the agent when we went back outside. There were even more people waiting to view it now.

“The front door should’ve stayed locked,” one of the other viewers said.

In the end, we finally found a place and I’m pleased to say we have landed on our feet. We viewed the house, a two-bed redbrick, end-of-terrace in mid-February and loved it. We did not expect to hear back again after the viewing as had happened so many times before.

Later the same afternoon we were offered a lease, at €1,550 a month, and we couldn’t sign it quickly enough.

There are so many others in much more urgent situations that are still searching for somewhere to rent or maybe even buy. Given the Government’s apparent lack of urgency in trying to bring down rents or the general cost of living, an improvement even in the medium term looks unlikely.

The effects of the country’s housing crisis are taking a detrimental toll on peoples’ self-esteem. It’s hard not to feel like you’re failing when you can’t even get a viewing.

We’re extremely lucky to be where we are now, and after 14 months of looking, we can finally breathe a little easier. Now we can start making something that should be an essential for everyone – a home.