About once a month I set the parameters on my favourite property apps to “maximum €100,000” and “all of Ireland” and set off on a mildly hopeful but largely depressing scroll. Through various means – significant savings built up during the peak of my recent success as an author, some family help, and maybe a credit union loan – I figure I could buy a home outright for a hundred grand. Isn’t that the dream, to be mortgage- and rent-free? It is for me, a minimally attractive mortgage candidate smack bang in middle age without any property to my name, ageing knees and organs, and a pension portfolio so scant that my accountant once asked me with his eyes closed what age I was planning to retire at.
The sub-100k properties for sale around Ireland right now have several things in common. A huge number of them feature what I like to call “the aul lad chair”. It’s a high-backed fireside armchair upholstered in dusty pink or pale green velvet, or maybe a busy floral brocade. It has seen much, much better days. The arms are dirty or well-worn, the seat is sagging, and there’s a definite indentation where the aul lad used to rest his weary head. The aul lad chair is almost always situated beside a vintage Aga, the type that would sell for seven grand in its reconditioned state but has already been lost to rust and disuse. Atop the Aga there might be an ancient enamel saucepan and above it a sacred heart lamp.
Above the aul lad chair and indeed evident and encroaching every room in the house is the real reason the property is so “cheap”, the sinister presence of damp and black mould. Even the listings where only the corners of the rooms seem affected and my heart jumps at the prospect of a house that might be immediately habitable, the blurb always features the damning phrase, “requires extensive renovation”. A closer inspection usually reveals a juvenile oak tree growing out of the roof and a life-threatening electrical situation.
These houses depress me for several reasons. I mourn their previous inhabitants, especially the properties where more glimpses of their lives are evident – blankets on beds, newspapers scattered on floors, personal hygiene items in frigid, burgundy bathrooms. That they’ve fallen into such disrepair is shameful, yet understandable. They’re usually rural and remote, and probably needed renovation and modernisation while their final occupants were still alive. Grieving or absent families aren’t in a position to maintain these houses, and vacancy sounds a speedy death knell.
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I wish I had it in me to buy a crumbling cottage for eighty grand and renovate it beautifully, but I don’t. It’s hard enough to pin down a tradesperson in Dublin, imagine trying to do so in rural Roscommon or Longford, which is where many of these properties are. On the rare occasion when there is a somewhat turnkey house advertised it’s usually prohibitively remote. The listing will try to sell it as an “attractive potential holiday home or investment property”, compounding one of the reasons we’re in this crisis in the first place.
Grappling with the sums of money bandied about on the housing market is difficult to grasp. Day after day I see properties for sale for two, three, four million and I wonder who the people with that kind of budget are. One-hundred thousand euro is at once an unimaginable amount of money and a meaningless sum. Imagine all I could do with it, and yet it is a drop in the ocean of house prices. A friend who bought her house a few years ago maintains that after a certain point, the numbers become empty. You become so desperate that an extra 10, 20, 50 thousand seems acceptable debt to take on. You’re going to be paying it off for the next 30 years anyway. I have a couple of friends at the bidding stage of their home-buying journeys and the tactics and greed of both estate agents and sellers are truly sickening. Bid deadlines mean nothing as long as someone is still coughing up. Modest, former council houses are pushing seven and eight hundred grand. I’m now faced with paying a sickening amount for a one-bed apartment in a Dublin suburb to stay relatively close to my friends and community or move several counties away for a little more space but a lonely existence. And with more than 15,000 people homeless in our country, I’m lucky with that, I know.
