When you look for a place to live in Japan, the first thing you do is check out websites for rentals, or go to the nearest real estate office—right? But things Ireland are a bit different.
To start, real estate offices only exist for the sake of the landlords. There are no services designed to help the people who are looking for a place to live, so you have to look through the properties they post online yourself to find something that meets your requirements, and then contact them for a showing if you want to see something you like.
Then things really get tricky… because they don’t return your calls (lol).
Despite the fact that it’s the capital of Ireland, Dublin is a compact city—and it keeps getting flooded with exchange students and foreigners looking for work. There is a serious housing shortage. According to what I’ve heard, the real estate offices get like a hundred and fifty emails if they leave a property up on their site for a day. So they obviously can’t respond to them all—they can really only open the first few and reply to those. And to prevent the avalanche of emails, many of them have their systems set up to delete the posts after an hour or two. It’s a smart policy to keep things sane on their end, but it turns into a race against the clock for everyone trying to get in. You can’t let your guard up for a second—even if you’re working or commuting. You have to keep your eyes glued to the sites so you can respond immediately when something good comes up.
Once you get an initial response, you go and see it—and you only get one showing due to the high demand. If you can’t make it at the time they specify, you’re instantly out (lol). And there are usually five to fifteen groups invited to the same showing, so your chances are still pretty low. If you like the place after the showing, you’ve then got to send them proof of employment, income information, and proof of your current residence so they can sort through the candidates.
The reality is that people who are transferring jobs have a high success rate (lol).
I started looking around mid-July this time, and finally ended up getting a place at the end of November. Everyone talks about how critical food, clothing, and shelter are—but I’m convinced that shelter is the most important. I mean, you can’t do anything unless you have a place to live (lol).
If you’re thinking of coming to Dublin someday, you need to either get a head start on looking for a place or make arrangements to get a homestay or something set up immediately after you arrive.
There are also a lot of scams that take advantage of the housing shortage. Many of them are obviously shady—like the ones where people say they’ve purchased a house but don’t live in Ireland anymore and want to rent it out, and will mail you the key if you wire them money. And the rent and property are not balanced. You know right off the bat that those are fake, but some of them are fairly clever, so you’ve got to be on your guard. One of my coworkers went to a showing, exchanged a deposit for a key, and when he went back to the place and opened the door on his move-in date, found a person living there asking who he was. It’s creepy enough to give you goosebumps when you think about why the person had the key—and of course he never got his deposit back. I can imagine how crazy the situation made him, considering that he thought he had finally gotten a contract on a place when that happened.
Another thing you’ve got to watch out for are the rents. Food prices and so on are not much different here than they are in Japan, but I’m guessing that the rents are even higher than they are in Tokyo. If you are thinking of a tiny studio apartment with kitchen, you will have to pay no less than JPY 100,000 a month, so you might want to look at a shared housing situation.
This post has been one negative thing after another, but now you know the reality of the housing situation in Dublin. I’ll leave you with a photo showing how beautiful fall is here to make it up to you (lol).
