How we set up in Ireland and other fun parts of the Housing Crisis

We were very excited to be given the opportunity to move to Ireland through my obtaining a job offer on a CSEP.

We lived well enough in South Africa but had been looking to move for various reasons and one of them, quite honestly, was that after the pandemic and the riots etc, work just wasn’t going well for my husband and we wanted to make a fresh start financially as well as on all other levels.

We scrimped and saved and came over with just enough to basically get here and keep going for about a month.

Point being – we didn’t have a massive amount of money to just dip into in the case of a crisis and we had to manage our finances very carefully.

Given the housing crisis in Ireland at the moment, I thought I would share our experience in finding and moving into a long term rental within 3 weeks of arriving, I hope it might help someone.

There were 5 of us – my husband and myself, my 21 year old daughter, our 7 year old son and my sister in law who decided to visit here – she’s going back to SA in a bit, but wanted to explore Ireland.

So, 5 of us – that’s a lot of accommodation and not easy to find.

Firstly, we knew that we would have to pay for temporary accommodation while we looked for a long term rental.

Short term accommodation through Airbnb is SUPER expensive, especially as we arrived mid summer holiday. We used a combination of Airbnb and Booking.Com to find the cheapest and most convenient accommodation we could.

All self-catering.

One of them (which was fantastic in so many other ways) had us all sleeping in the same room – 2 double beds and one single bed in one room.

We ended up staying in 4 different places, about 3 – 5 days in each.

It was no fun lugging all the luggage around, trips between the various places took 2 to 3 trips

Husbands – PLEASE don’t’ bring your mountain bikes and golf clubs with you – really they can wait for the containers – you can hire anything here including that stuff!!!

We really learned patience, and the value of personal space, and being kind to each other – it was TOUGH!

So, my first point, if you’re scared of doing this because of limited funds – there is a way to do it, you CAN do it – and you will have to get your heads in the right space.

South Africans all think we can rough it out:

– tents, no loos, taking loo paper and a spade off with you to find a spot when you need to go

– cooking on open fires and aluminium pots, eating bully beef and baked beans…

none of that compares to living on top of each other for 5 days climbing over your pep bags to get into your bed and getting to know each other so well that you know who’s in the en-suite bathroom by the sound track coming out of it… ????

Anyway – I can write a book about those experiences!

But… my main story is about finding the rental so – here goes.

Because I knew we didn’t have the money to stay in temporary accommodation for months whilst looking, we had 3 to 4 weeks of money at most, I was extremely meticulous about looking for housing, and this is how I did it. We found a rental within 3 weeks with the most fantastic agent and in a beautiful area in a house that’s possibly bigger than our SA house, and we lived well there…

It went like this:

Before accepting my job offer, we booked a session with Megan who explained a LOT to us about how to get over there and what was required.

I signed up for the lifetime membership to the SA2Eire website to get access to all the material and it was one of the best investments I made.

I followed the SA2Eire FB group daily, I searched all the topics I thought of both on the group for comments and on the website

– there was just about no question that I couldn’t find an answer for that way.

It’s hard to look for accommodation until you know exactly when you will be there, but in any case I kept looking – mostly on daft.ie – just to stay in the know about what was on offer where etc.

Oh PS, we both work in and around Dublin.

Once we knew we were going – my CSEP had been approved – but we hadn’t negotiated a start date yet, I went straight into prep mode for the rentals.

I used the rental CV advice on the website to compile our rental CV.

We owned our house in SA, but had rented before buying it about 5 years before that.

So I included everything I could possibly think of:

Covering letter, which included a picture of my husband and myself, which was like an “executive summary”.
I made sure to emphasise family values, ethics, the fact that we are homeowners and understand how important it is to maintain a property and the impact on property values etc.
I also included our job offers (luckily for us we both had these),
our budget (I literally worked it out – based on reasonable living in SA and doing monthly online mock-shops on Tescos, along with the blogs and advice on the SA2Eire website) to prove how much we would have available to pay for rent.
I included our title deed, a bond statement to prove it was being paid, our utilities (all – rates, lights, water) to prove they were being paid, and proof of our homeowners insurance.
I got hold of our previous rental agents and managed to get a rental reference from them as well as from a company I rented an office from for a while.
I also included character references for us – I made to sure to get them from respected people – accountant, minister and teacher.
I also included 3 months’ SA banks statements for both of us, and our passports and marriage certificate.
I put these into a table in the executive summary, labelled each one as an attachment, and then named all the attachment files accordingly, made sure everything was in PDF and in an easily emailed zip file.
I also included some detail about our family and why we are moving to Ireland – and I focused on the positives of moving, not on any negatives of leaving.

Once we actually had an arrival date, I created an account on daft.ie and filled in my details, as well as rent.ie and myhome.ie – I filled in as much info as possible on my profile – contact info, what we were looking for, budget/income, preferred areas etc – anything the profile asked for, even the non-compulsory fields.

I then began bombarding the daft.ie site mostly, every time a new rental came up.

When you “apply” you message through rentals.ie, and you have an opportunity to comment.

I drafted a standard comment and used it throughout all my applications and in a nutshell it said what that we’re both professionals, our combined annual gross income in €, what we were looking for and our budget range.

This really seemed to work because I was getting many responses and invitations to 4 viewings before even arriving, and more afterwards. In fact, one agent (all legit) even offered us something with a virtual viewing.

Some advice here is that you should read the auto replies that come in from daft.ie to confirm that you’ve enquired about a property, as sometimes the agent’s reply includes something like they prefer to work with enquiries that come directly through their website, or ask you to go to another site to register your interest.

So, for every one of those, if there was a further instruction, I followed it – and ended up registering accounts and expressing interest in a while lot of other places too, and again, I completed everything in a profile that was possible, including uploading documents where required.

We couldn’t find someone to view properties for us, and some landlords/agents want to meet you first, so we didn’t actually secure anything before we came over except for the one, but we said we wanted to see it ourselves first.

Once here, I carried on bombarding, picked up the phone and called people and physically walked into a few offices with our resume – our first Airbnb was in Lucan which we fell in love with – and we literally walked into estate agents, said what we were looking for, left resume copies and phone numbers etc. People here like the phone – everything is done on the phone or in the post – it’s great.

So, with all of these things, we got a lot of interest – it really helps to make face to face or at least voice to voice connections.

We were like most families looking for a furnished rental. As I said, there are 5 of us at the moment.

We ended up being offered 3 places, 2 of them were 3 bed and furnished, one was 4 bed, beautiful,

but unfurnished,

for which I had previously enquired on daft.ie but had been offered to someone else, which fell through.

Like so many, we were still counting our little rands and certainly had no money in the budget for furnishing a home from scratch.

But…. We considered long term comfort over short term convenience and made the decision to take the unfurnished even if we had to sleep on mattresses and eat off paper plates for a while.

Then I heard about and downloaded adverts.ie.

There is also FB market place and a number of buy and sell / free stuff type FB pages and sites. I only used adverts.ie. They have LOADS of free stuff, many of them in perfectly acceptable condition.

Before we took even took occupation (* see note below) I had managed to furnish the entire house for free.

Lounge, dining room, kitchen table, outdoor furniture, 2 single beds, 2 double beds, drawers, desk, TV, crockery, cutlery ….

The only things we bought were bedding, the cheapest Ikea had to offer, and a few kitchen items which we bought from second-hand shops for under €20 for a whole lot of stuff.

I organised all the collections for the same day – again, just constant and friendly communication with the “sellers” was enough for some of them to let me take the goods even when there was someone else who could fetch them earlier.

I then hired a large high-roof van for the day – I used Murphy's Truck and Van Rental Vehicle Rental in Dublin and honestly the rental for a whole day only double the cost of an HOURLY rate quoted to me by a mover.

I could drive it perfectly well with my SA licence and as a woman – they were great in explaining any “common mistakes” etc.

And then I went off by myself with my list and google maps drove it around the county myself, collected it all and got it into the house.

I got to meet incredible people who, when they heard our story, started offering more stuff… the Irish are just amazing.

So….. lesson here?

Yes as Megan and Vicky keep saying, be prepared, be persistent, but also - don’t limit yourself to furnished rentals only. It is completely possible to furnish a whole house here FOR FREE.

Good luck to everyone still on that rental hunting journey!

Oh and PS – about rental deposits and advance rental payments.

We learned this the hard way and it ended up costing us 3 additional nights of temporary accommodation – if you can help it AT ALL – try to get your money over into an Irish bank account as soon as you can.

We transferred the rental in advance from one account in SA, and the deposit from another account at HSBC in the UK.

They obviously both needed to be in the agents’ account before we could actually take occupation – they specifically need the funds to CLEAR – the proof of payment is not enough.

It ended up taking 4 working days for the one to clear, and we had to wait a few extra days to move in… lesson learned there – if moving in is time sensitive because of temporary accommodation, paying out of an Irish bank account is the way to go.

OPEN A Non-resident bank account BEFORE YOU LEAVE SA- make sure you have time to transfer funds

And Good ol' Irish luck!!

Important links:

#MapMyMove- Our coaching Services - Confused or lost and need some direction, book a session with us to help untangle the confusion and work out your route of immigration