WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD?
What will the new normal for property look like? Country living, super basements and the end of open plan, say the experts. Katy McGuinness and Fran Power report
THE property market may be in what one commentator calls ‘a short-lived Ice Age’, but there is widespread confidence that as the threat of Covid-19 recedes, construction will pick up, and prices will rally, and buying and selling will continue more or less where they left off. The real long-term impact on the market though may turn out to be on what we buy, and where we buy it. There will, says Austin Hughes, chief economist of KBC Bank, be behavioural changes.
“For health and financial reasons people may sit on their hands for a while,” says Hughes, “but ultimately [the property market] will move back to something like it was, coloured by people’s experience of where they want to live and how they want to commute, which possibly will be influenced by their experience of the virus.”
There may be new priorities, he says, “‘Do I want to travel long distances? Do I want a property where I have some space to myself ?’ It is going to affect buying behaviour in different ways in the longer term.
“Others are going to say, ‘Hang on a minute, maybe I need to be more careful about being financially leveraged, or consider how long my commute is, or using public transport.’
“The wisdom used to be: Make sure you find somewhere where there is good public transport, but now, maybe that isn’t quite the panacea to all possible problems.”
Dublin estate agent Owen Reilly has already seen one of his buyers change his house-hunting priorities. “One client cancelled the purchase of a pied-a-terre in Dublin and is now looking for a wilderness property in Connemara, that he can retreat to if this happens again,” he says.
That retreat to the country is something that Maeve McCarthy has seen in her area of West Cork, a picturesque area known as a holiday home hotspot. “Every holiday home is occupied,” she says. “Big, urban areas are great until something happens. Then you’re more vulnerable. People are coming here because our community is so strong, we can all look out for each other. We’re all managing to work from home and it works — the children can run around safely in the garden, and it’s a short walk to the beach.”
James Butler, head of country agency at Savills, expects that, post lockdown, the country market will come into sharper focus too. “At the end of this, everyone in business will have had first-hand experience of working from home — and the peace of mind that it can, and does, work — so there will be more of an opportunity to work from home in the future.
“In terms of location, buyers want accessibility to cities and airports, and privacy but not isolation. Of course in the country, you get much more bang for your buck with average values much lower than in the city; for families that don’t need to be in the city that is a huge consideration.”
At the upper end of the market, Owen Reilly predicts that one consequence of Covid-19 is that property owners will seek to install panic rooms and bunkers, and he expects there to be a growing demand for super-basements that exist in other cities around the world.
“There’s no doubt that it’s going to be a different world when this is over and we will think differently about a lot of things,” he says, “how we design and build, and what we will do if tech stops working.”
Rowena Quinn of Hunters estate agents says that, like many others, she too finds herself “scrambling to find a home office/homework space where we will be undisturbed to take that call, write that document or read our Billionaire Boy Chapter 4 out loud, but the reality is we are not in the office or in the classroom, and many of us now live in a space that is open plan. I expect when all this passes more people will be working from home and open-plan will need to be looked at. People will want to be able to convert an attic or a garage, or buy something with a good garden that will allow for an extension to provide more than one reception room downstairs or with room for a Shomera.”
“This is going to be seismic,” says Della O’Donoghue, managing director of M.Co, a project management company working with clients across a wide range of sectors. “It will change everything about how we live and work.
“If there are going to be more people working at home we have to think about practical things like pets and children, and about physical design to facilitate remote working. People need a dedicated work space that can be shut away and concealed if necessary — that can be a space under the stairs or a working wall in a bedroom. It’s important that there’s a mental distinction between work and home.”
But the implications don’t stop at just installing a home office. They spill over into how we manage our work/life balance and beyond. As O’Donoghue says: “Flexibility is key. Changes that might have taken years to implement are now happening overnight. It’s not as black and white as saying people will work from home offices in the future. We are all interested in the big questions of how we live and work. We have to be genuinely agile and creative, there are challenges for employers. But there are positives too, we forget our capacity for change, for finding a new way.”
‘This is going to be seismic, it will change everything’