Home-hunters get priorities straight in 2021

Mortgage approvals slowed during the first lockdown as buyers working in sectors such as leisure and hospitality lost their jobs, but approvals soared to a new record by October.

Anxious vendors held off putting their home on the market, leading to bidding wars for existing properties among buyers who have been both unaffected by job losses and having seen their savings surge due to fewer spending opportunities.

So where has that left home-hunting hopefuls as we enter 2021?

We talked to five sets of home-hunters who plan to buy in 2021. The Covid-19 restrictions and a mass shift towards working from home have already encouraged some of these buyers to rethink their priorities, including the importance of having a dedicated work space in their new home as well as a larger garden than they originally wanted.

Meantime, others are deciding to move out of urban areas altogether towards a new life in the countryside.

The family wanting more room

‘We needed a bigger home with closed-off spaces’

Like many house-hunters, Fiona and Tony Walsh were prompted by the lockdowns of 2020 to consider swapping suburban living for a larger home in the countryside.

Fiona, a trained scientist who moved to Ireland from the UK in 1999 to work in the pharmaceutical industry, has been working from home during the pandemic at the family’s three-bed terraced house in the Cork suburb of Rochestown. She and Tony have two daughters, aged five and eight.

“The downstairs is all very open plan and I have a desk in the living area and there’s lots of noise,” says Fiona. “We needed a bigger home with closed-off spaces.”

At the end of 2019, the IT trainer set up a business called Imagine Coaching that provides with training on PowerPoint presentations. She operated that alongside her role at a Cork pharmaceutical firm, but was told last spring that she couldn’t return to the office until a Covid-19 vaccine was rolled out.

Last April, she and Tony decided to put their home on the market so they could buy a larger house in a rural location.

“My husband is in his 50s and we decided that if we didn’t do it now, we wouldn’t have enough years left to work to pay off a new mortgage,” Fiona says.

The couple have viewed seven properties according to Covid-19 protocols — “you were greeted outside with hand-sanitiser and with strict orders not to touch anything like light switches”.

They found a four-bed detached 1980s bungalow on a third of an acre on Fota, one of the islands in Cork Harbour.

“The other properties were subject to other bids and even bidding wars, but this property had been on the market for 12 months. It’s in a rural location near the Fota Island Resort.

“But there’s an entrance to a quarry across the road, which might have put some people off, but not us. It has a separate kitchen/diner, two living rooms, and one of the bedrooms could be used as a home office.

“It’s in all right condition. We have a fair bit of money to spend on it but I’m not big into making lots of changes — we looked at lots of houses with extensions that didn’t make sense.

“So the first thing I would do is an energy audit. I’d like to get an independent reviewer from the SEAI, which costs about €500.”

The trader-upper

‘We are looking for another period house we can do up’

Children’s author and editor Síne Quinn and her husband Martin Bradley bought their Edwardian terraced red-brick at Summerville Park in Rathmines 12 years ago, when their twin sons were aged around five.
Six years ago, as the boys grew, so too did the couple’s period home: Síne and Martin added a side extension to create a large kitchen/diner and extended up into the attic to create a guest bedroom, a shower room and a study.
This latter space is home to two desks that Síne and Martin use for work; in November, Síne held a virtual launch of Holy Shocking Saints: The Extraordinary Lives of 12 Irish Saints, her new book with illustrator Margaret Anne Suggs.
The same month, Síne and Martin put their Rathmines house on the market for €825,000 through Knight Frank so they could hunt for a larger home in the area. After all, their twins have just turned 17 and are 6ft tall.
“We’ve been here 12 years and we really love it, so we’re quite torn about moving, but we want another creative process and somewhere slightly bigger for the twins,” says Síne. “We used to live in Irishtown before Rathmines and we loved moving to a different area and discovering it.”
The couple are keen to take on another fixer-upper, but a dearth of supply in Dublin 6’s period-home market within their budget means they may have to cast their net wider.
“We would love to stay in the area, but there’s not a huge amount coming up on the market, so we are thinking about broadening our location search,” says Síne. “We have viewed about eight or nine properties, mostly in Rathmines, Terenure and Rathgar. Some of them were suitable and we did bid on them, and some went out of our price range. One had too much work to be done on it in terms of planning.
“We are looking for another period house that we can do up. It’s nice to be able to put our own mark on a home and add to it and, realistically, any place that is in turnkey condition is in such demand that prices are sky high.
“We would ideally like to have the same set-up as we have now — three bedrooms with an attic conversion, but with larger proportions and maybe more of a garden, as well as two reception rooms and a separate kitchen. We were very glad to have separate living rooms during lockdown.”

The overseas-based buyer

‘We wanted a countryside setting near the beach instead of busy roads’

In mid-December, British entrepreneur Cathy Homer and her husband Paul braved a rough boat trip from Holyhead to Rosslare so they could view a derelict cottage in Wexford.
The couple has just sold their large art-deco style home in the British Midlands and plan on moving permanently to a smaller doer-upper in the Wexford countryside once their three children — aged 11, 15 and 17 — have grown up. They intend on using it a holiday home in the meantime.
Cathy and Paul already know the sunny southeast pretty well: Cathy was a pastry chef living in Ireland for 10 years, having operated restaurants in Wexford.
The pair’s youngest daughter was born in Wexford and all three children went to school in Kilmuckridge.
“We always felt at home in Wexford,” says Cathy. “I came back to the UK for health reasons, but I never settled there. We wanted a countryside setting, which is primarily what I was bought up in, and we wanted access to the beach instead of busy roads near a town centre.”
In early December, Cathy spotted a two-storey, three-bed rural cottage on Daft.ie and asked her friend in Blackwater to view it. They put in an offer. But there were two major hurdles — a counter-bid and “the estate agent wouldn’t take our offer seriously unless we saw the property in person”.
As a result, the pair — armed with negative Covid-19 tests — booked a cabin on the ferry and drove to Wexford and back over a 10-hour period so they could view the cottage. They self-isolated on their return to the UK.
With the offer accepted, they hope the transaction will go through in 2021 so they can begin renovations. When they eventually move, they hope to continue working from home: Cathy started an online bath salts business called Soak at the start of the pandemic, and Paul is an IT contractor.
“I will run an Irish branch of Soak from a workshop we plan to build on the side of the cottage,” Cathy says. “There are two bedrooms upstairs and one will be an office for Paul and one will be for the children. I’m so excited.”

The serial flippers

‘The cottage is extremely run-down but we welcome the challenge’

Inspired by watching her father renovate old homes in West Cork during the 1970s, Orla Ward started her house-flipping hobby at the age of 23 in London, where she revamped and sold Victorian properties.
When Orla met David, the pair realised they were a match in more ways than one — not only did they both have children from previous relationships, they shared a passion for refurbishing period properties.
The couple got married five years ago and created a blended family. Their projects include a 250-year-old home in Northern Ireland and a holiday home on a Greek island. Together they run Red Gable Cleaning, which cleans red and green algae from the exterior walls of properties.
Orla, a former nurse, and David, a one-time marine engineer, currently live in a four-bed 3,595 sq ft home in the Longford village of Lanesborough. The pair purchased the home in 2017 when it was just a shell, with no wiring, plumbing, stairs or second floor.
“We essentially bought it in the dark,” says 54-year-old Orla. “All the windows were boarded up and we could only get in the back door. We had to use the torchlight from the phone to look around.”
That home, which now has a cinema room and a sauna, is on the market for €650,000 as the Wards plan on moving on to their next project: a derelict cottage in Mitchelstown that has no septic tank or indoor toilet, but has stone outbuildings, one of which could be used as a recording studio for one of their sons.
“We are in the process of putting in an offer on it and hope it will be accepted,” Orla says. “It’s extremely run-down, but we welcome the challenge. We plan to do it up to the same standard as the house we’re living in. It’s not going to be a twee cottage on the inside; we want to try and keep the character of it, but make it warm and modern with a contemporary interior.”
The prospect of the work involved doesn’t faze Orla and David.
“This is our hobby — we don’t have a TV and we don’t go to the pub.”

The couple seeking a period rural home

‘It has to be in the country, preferably with an acre of land, but I don’t want one of those dormer bungalows’

Padraigh McEnaney, who trained as a carpenter and electrician, has loathed city life since he first moved to Dublin at the age of 16 to work in construction.
“I lived in Cabra and used to have to get up at 5.30am to get to the site in Sandyford on time,” says Padraigh, who went on to set up Advanced Fire Protection, a fire alarm installation and maintenance service.
“I used to go home to Cavan every weekend.”
Padraigh developed a love of period homes in the countryside, having grown up as one of 10 children in a “massive house” with nine bedrooms, three sitting rooms and two kitchens.
He and his partner Sabrina Purtill, a first-time buyer, would like to buy their first house together in Meath this year and Padraigh would ideally love a four-bed Georgian home or an old farmhouse that he could revamp.
“It has to be in the country, preferably with an acre of land and off the main road,” he says. “But I don’t want one of those dormer bungalows that are now so commonplace in the countryside.”
Padraigh already owns a three-bed rural cottage in the Cavan village of Shercock, which he bought at the age of 20. But moving in there with his partner is not an option as the commute would be too long for Sabrina, a Sales Negotiator with Sherry FitzGerald Sherry in Dunshaughlin, who rents a home near Navan that she shares with her two children.
With Sabrina’s help, Padraigh put his cottage on the market for €150,000 last summer so the couple could search for their own home in Meath.
“We were talking about buying [in 2020], but decided to hold off until the middle of 2021 because I think property prices will fall,” says Padraigh, who also owns a property company in Dublin that buys and rents out houses.
“We have a budget of around €300,000 and we have seen loads of properties. But we won’t be in a position to buy until my house has sold and we can then apply for a joint mortgage.
“The house would have to be in Meath for Sabrina’s sake and the children, and it would have to be in a location where country people are still country people, which is hard to get the closer you get to Dublin.”