PROPERTY IS A ROLLERCOASTER RIDE
Liz O’Kane is back!
As the host of RTÉ shows House Hunters and – when we really lost the run of ourselves – House Hunters in the Sun, Liz O’Kane was a poster girl for Celtic Tiger Ireland. The big sister of comic and Dancing With The Stars finalist Deirdre, Liz put her money where her mouth was too, investing in a property development ‘at the wrong time’ – and having to relocate her young family to Abu Dhabi to pay the bills.
‘Everything went like a stack of dominoes because suddenly property became a dirty word,’ she says, when we meet in Dublin’s Merrion Hotel. ‘Anything to do with property on the telly, bye bye; property columns, bye bye. I lost my business within six to nine months. Now I’m kind of back!’
The story of how Liz, who describes herself as ‘the original buyer’s agent’ has made this comeback is one of determination and resourcefulness. Not everyone who lost big in the bust has been able to do the same. ‘I think what happened during the recession was so catastrophic a lot of business people in the property world – developers and otherwise – weren’t able to come back,’ she says. ‘I think mentally they were so destroyed that to even try to come back from the brink was too much.’
Now the buyer’s agent for Hunters Estate Agent, Liz has recently been busy sourcing houses for Irish high-fliers living abroad and hoping to move home in the coming years. Amazingly, as the market tightens and prices continue to rise, some couples are even buying these forever homes sight unseen.
Liz, from Drogheda, explains what inspired her to launch her house-hunting business in the early 2000s. ‘Funnily enough it was Kirstie Allsopp. Location, Location, Location had just started on Channel 4 and I thought, I want to be her. So I started a business called Get Sorted, a house-
hunting service.’ At the time she had a toddler son, Rossa, and newborn daughter Ellie, who are now 19 and 17. ‘I started with my website and little by little a couple of clients came along and that morphed into something bigger. The timing was great: it was 2002, the market was in a real upward trajectory.’
But it was also ‘very pressurised and you had parents giving their children massive deposits based on the equity in their own homes. When you think about it now, it was a tragedy for that to be allowed,’ she complains.
‘People were queuing up outside brand spanking new housing estates. Oddly enough we’re back at that stage again now, we’ve just done a complete 360.’
While getting her company off the ground, Liz still worked for estate agents at the weekend, showing prospective buyers around houses. One day, the RTÉ cameras showed up unannounced filming House Hunters. The producer obviously saw something in Liz and asked her to do a piece to camera, which she did. ‘This was on a Saturday. She rang me Monday and said, “Will you come in?” That literally led to seven seasons of House Hunters and House Hunters in the Sun.’
Both of these shows followed couples or individuals as they looked for and purchased their dream homes in Ireland and abroad. ‘That was bonkers as well when you think about it because we were investing in Spain and France and Cape Verde and Romania and Bulgaria.’
Where is Cape Verde? ‘Exactly! Where is Cape Verde? It’s off the coast of north Africa, way down past the Canary Islands – keep goin’! We were buying ski chalets and places on the Black Sea,’ she says, wide-eyed at the memory of those heady days of lending.
Sometimes Liz was away from her young family for up to five days filming abroad.
‘My husband did a bloody good job. They were about five and three at the time. He was hugely supportive and of course we had that conversation, do I turn this down or do we run with it? It was a damn good experience. I’d be sorry to have missed it.’
Liz’s interest in property began when she flipped her first apartment near Heathrow aged 20. ‘I bought it for £35,000 and sold it 18 months later for £58,500.’
She had been working for British Airways at the time, having started there after finishing boarding school in Dublin and hitch hiking around Europe for a year. By the time she moved home in 1994 after ten years with BA, Liz had flipped a second property and caught the bug. ‘I always had a passion for property, was always looking at property, always giving advice to friends about properties, reading the property supplements and watching the auctions.’
She even spent over a year in Almeria, Spain, where she founded an estate agency between having her first and second babies. The family finally settled in leafy Rathmines, Dublin 6. ‘Everything went crash, bang, wallop – and very quickly – circa 2010. Unfortunately we had invested in property at the wrong time and so the greatest learning curve of all was the disappointment about being part of that catastrophe after working so hard to get to a good level in life. We took a risk to do something else at the wrong time and something which I wanted to back away from but couldn’t. It was a development here [in Ireland],’ she confirms.
‘My husband was also in the construction industry – an architect – so we were hugely exposed. We ended up in the Middle East for a few years. We went off to Abu Dhabi. Everyone was shipping out.’
While with BA, Liz had worked in the Gulf states for three years and there were other incentives. ‘Construction was booming and it’s only eight hours’ flight away so you can get there relatively easily. It’s a very seductive part of the world – salaries are high and tax free. You’re seduced by all of that until you realise their school fees are €30,000 a year and rent is €45,000. It’s more difficult to make ends meet than you realise.’
Liz was there on a spousal visa ‘so technically you can’t work. I thought, what can I do?’ She had been involved with the Davis Cup tennis team in Ireland so volunteered at the Mubadala tournament there, a precursor to the Australian Open grand slam.
‘We had Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal, Novak Djokovic – my daughter had a lovely experience of hitting with Rafa,’ she recalls. ‘I took the role of volunteers coordinator – there were 200 volunteers. It was a bloody huge job and I was doing it for free. It was worth it because I got to know a lot of people and that went on from September until the end of January 2011.’
Next she got a job as a teacher’s assistant in the British school Rossa and Ellie attended. ‘I actually loved it! It was the senior infants class. It suited me because I was dropping my own kids to school at 7.45am, which is when school starts there. We had to get up every day at 5.30am. The thoughts of it, still,’ she shudders.
‘We had rented our house in Dublin to a friend
If we all knew when to buy at the bottom and get out at the top, we’d be laughing
and we came back to Ireland in 2012/2013 when the kids were on the verge of secondary school. So I got them settled in.’
Her sister Deirdre had just made the film Noble and Liz volunteered for a time at the Christina Noble Children’s Foundation. Then, slowly but surely, the property market began to come back to life. Liz dipped her toe in with a part-time job in an estate agency before she ‘approached Rowena Quinn in Hunters and I said, “Give us a job”... She said she was thinking of bringing a buyers’ agent in-house. I said, “Let’s give it a shot.”’
Liz’s house-hunting fee is in the region of €5,000-10,000 dependent on the search and whether her clients are first-time purchasers. She insists there is no conflict of interest working for an estate agency.
Her favourite clients are living abroad. ‘If it’s a remote hunt, I can get it done incredibly quickly. I had a client who lives in Singapore and he came home for three days. I’d say we saw 30 properties in that three-day period. We went hammer and tongs and got him his family home. He’s not moving home for another five years.’
She recently sealed a deal for another Irish couple living in Australia, who didn’t even view the property themselves first.
‘They’re both working in finance, they live in Sydney. They now have two small children with the intention of coming back to Dublin in two to three years.
‘They bought a beautiful house in a beautiful location, a house that any of us would want: a double bay Victorian house in Dublin 6, including the contents, for them to put straight into the rental market with Hunters. It was seamless. Their mum and dad saw the house, we did the deal and approved the property and they then came home to sign and view the property.’
Her little sister Deirdre moved home from London in 2016 with her filmmaker husband Steve Bradley and their two children Holly, 13, and 10-year-old Daniel. Initially they rented in Dun Laoghaire.
‘Yes I did find a house for my sister,’ smiles Liz. ‘They managed to get their kids into a national school locally and she was saying, “We’ll never be able to buy a house here”. I said, “Well, the ugliest house on the best street is for sale for about nine months and you haven’t even spotted it. Get down and buy that house, ye big feckin’ eejits!” They bought it and they’ve done a super job on it. That house had been on the market for quite a long time – it was definitely bought for €100,000 less than it was originally listed for.’
It’s clear that Liz is back doing what she loves. ‘Everyone is healthy and I’m doing what I want to do,’ she says.
Of her personal experience of boom and bust she says: ‘If we all knew how to start a business and get out of a business at the right time, wouldn’t that be great? As I say to people when they’re buying property, if we all knew when to buy at the bottom and get out at the top, we’d be laughing. Everything is cyclical and nobody really knows when the cycle is going to change. It can be a rollercoaster ride.’
The last decade has proved she is ‘hugely resilient and very strong-minded. I have a very positive attitude. I’m lucky, I don’t have any mental health issues, I don’t get depressed. I have a low day but the following day I’m grand. I’m always, “Okay, what am I going to do next? Keep everything going.” And I’ve thankfully managed to keep everything going.’