GENERATION RENT

The scarcity of rental accommodation has led to all sorts of innovations in the market from co-sharing to care-taking. Katy McGuinness reports

STUDENTS at Trinity College Dublin know that the only sure-fire way to secure city centre accommodation — unless Mummy and Daddy happen to have a handy apartment lying vacant — is to compete and succeed in the famous Schols exams, held in January each year for second year students. The exams are notoriously tough, because the prize is so valuable: as well as exemption from the registration charge, dinner at Commons each night, and a no-fees Masters degree, Trinity’s scholars get free rooms for up to five years.

Newly elected scholars — there were 50 this year, announced by the Provost from the steps of the Public Theatre on Trinity Monday — are first offered accommodation in Trinity Hall in leafy Dublin 6, and in subsequent years are allocated rooms in the city centre either in Goldsmith’s Hall on Pearse Street or, most desirable of all, on campus in Front Square, Botany Bay or New Square, for which they pay no rent. If ever there was an incentive for working hard and staying away from the fleshpots of Harcourt Street on a Monday night, then Schols is it.

UCD has a similar programme, the Ad Astra, under which a bursary awarded to the brightest academic students and most talented athletes can be applied to offset the cost of accommodation on campus.

For students who don’t land either of these desirable subventions, there is the slog of finding accommodation by more tried and tested means. House shares are the traditional option, with digs regarded by many students as less desirable — even though parents may find the prospect of their little darling living under another family’s roof comforting.

These days, though, house shares are no longer just the preserve of students. Some working adults in their thirties, such as Julia Wilks (see panel), and older enjoy the conviviality of a shared home. In other countries, it’s becoming more common for friends to move in together to share costs and companionship when they’ve had enough of living alone in an empty nest after the death of a partner.

US property company Kennedy Wilson has recognised this desire for a living environment that’s inherently more sociable than an anonymous apartment complex. In its developments at Clancy Quay and Vantage in Sandyford, social spaces and communal lounges are just some of the features that appeal to the new breed of renter. These are the people who are sanguine about

their prospects of ever getting on the property ladder and want to live well in the meantime.

At the Humanitas Independent Senior Living Facility in Deventer in The Netherlands, five graduate students from the universities of Saxion and Windesheim live for free in small apartments alongside the elderly residents in exchange for 30 hours per month helping out and acting as good neighbours. The initiative is part of a project that aims to ward off the negative effects of aging. Similar intergenerational programs exist in Lyons, France, Cleveland, Ohio, and in 20 cities throughout Spain.

Former UCD student Peter Morrissey came up with the idea of Generation Accommodation, whereby dependable UCD students are paired with elderly residents of south Dublin with a spare room in 2014.

“I started it with the support of Enactus as a social enterprise to assist with the student housing crisis and also to help capable elderly homeowners in south Dublin that live alone. They’ve got plenty of rooms available and there are plenty of students struggling to find housing so it seemed like a no-brainer.”

The project began as a pilot with 26 students; Morrissey describes the matching process as “highly manual” and time-consuming. He is currently working on making the process more digital on the students’ side to reduce operational time.

“We have had very pro-active interest both from elderly people and certain cohorts of students, particularly mature students aged between 23 and 28, exchange students and freshers from outside Dublin whose parents want their son or daughter in a home,” says Morrissey.

In Australia and Canada, there are examples of students being offered free or low-cost accommodation in return for providing a level of support and companionship to a housemate with a physical or intellectual disability, and a number of pilot projects are being mooted here. Meanwhile, the Camphill communities of Ireland provide accommodation to the volunteers who live on site.

Camelot property guardians pay modest rents compared to those charged on the open market in return for caretaking properties that range from disused convents to suburban homes. However, a quick glance at their current list of opportunities shows no availability in Dublin, although there are some fine properties available around the country.

One practice in high rent areas may be coming to an end. For those who take on the lease of a pricy city-centre apartment, some opt to rent out their room on Airbnb to help cover the cost. However, this is not always legal under the terms of the lease and there can also be unexpected expenses that make the practice unviable.

Take the case of Celine who works at Google and used to rent out her room on Airbnb, but stopped when the numbers no longer made sense.

“Airbnb take 12pc commission for a start. When I arrived two years ago, my rent was half my salary and Airbnb was helpful because it allowed me to travel back to France, but then I received an email that I was liable for tax on the money I was earning — 51pc I think it was — and stopped.

“I didn’t want to take the risk, or to pay the tax. Grand Canal Dock is super-expensive, my rent has gone up €100 a month just over the course of a year to €900, and my room is very small. But the apartment is new and smart — I could get somewhere cheaper in the city centre but all my friends live around here so I want to stay,” she says.

Airbnb is blamed for the lack of affordable rental accommodation in capital cities around the world, including Dublin. Tourists are prohibited from renting entire apartments in Berlin, and there are restrictions in Barcelona, New York and — ironically, given that it is Airbnb’s base — San Francisco.

In London, a recent property tribunal found that a tenant had breached the terms of his lease by renting out his apartment in Brixton on the site, only for his neighbours to find 150 extra guests there for a party on Saturday night.

Some predict that it’s only a matter of time before there is a similar crackdown in Dublin, leaving a whole generation of millennials who have grown accustomed to the extra cash in their pockets from operating as a casual landlord scrabbling down the back of the B&B Italia sofa for the money to meet the rent.