‘Even now we’re struggling to continue to save because our rent has gone up’
Nurse Catherine Farrell and husband Barry, who works at Slane Distillery, are searching for land to build a home in Co Meath: “WE LIVED in Galway for 10 years before recently moving back to Barry’s homeplace in Meath. While living in Galway, we were approved for a mortgage for six months, and started actively looking for houses. There was about a month left on it, and we were looking at one house, and talking about putting an offer in on it.
Then we actually changed our minds and said, ‘Look, if we do buy a house in Galway, we’re going to have no family around us’, as well as the pressure of over €1,000 back in mortgage payments each month. Even now, we’re kind of struggling to continue to save because our rent has gone up since we moved up here to Meath.
In Galway, we had the same landlord for five years, who only put the rent up once, and it was still under €1,000. Now we’re paying €1,300 a month for a three-bedroom house in Ballinlough.
Luckily, we have our deposit saved, which is brilliant. Talking to family members helped us a lot because we didn’t have a clue starting off looking for a mortgage. Basically we went around all the different banks in the city, got the paperwork required for each bank and sat down and had an appointment with each of them.
In the end, we went with KBC who approved us for €250,000. For Galway city, that was very low — very few properties were under that. A couple of houses we were looking at in our own housing estate were at €235,000. Then when we went to see them and there were already bids in of €240,000 and €243,000, almost at the maximum of what we could afford. Straight away, there’s bidding wars over them.
One house we went to see, had 12 other people as well as us looking at it at the time. The auctioneer said, ‘Oh, we’ve already taken three offers’. So we started looking in Kells at houses in estates. A lot of them were less than €200,000, and you could do them up. Now we’ve changed again and we’re actually at the stage of saying we’d like to build, so we’ve recently started looking at sites.
When the six months mortgage approval lapsed, it was definitely disappointing. But it did open our eyes as to what properties were out there and what prices they were going for.
Hopefully our experiences will make it less stressful when we go for reapproval in the next couple of months and go back out looking again!”