The attitude towards students renting houses is unfair.
Finding a house to rent in Ireland is a struggle that is not exclusive to students. However, along with the already stressful process, being a student only hinders the chance of finding somewhere decent to live.
Having just finished my final year in college, I thought that because my friends and I were technically no longer students it would be much easier to find somewhere to live, but it was the opposite.
Here are just some of the issues we came across while searching for a house.
The estate agent doubted our ability to pay the rent because we were students.
Questions about affording rent are perfectly understandable, in most cases estate agents are just doing their job.
In each house we went to, we explained that we all had a job, if not two, and that we had been paying rent for the past three years while in college (which actually cost double what most of these houses cost).
One particular estate agent patronisingly told us that he knows we try our best but affording rent isn’t easy, and that the house was in such demand that he would give it to the highest bidder, assuming it wouldn’t be us.
Our degree made us even less desirable candidates
When we told landlords and estate agents that we had all just finished our degrees in journalism we got a worse reaction than we did for being students.
We are all well aware that journalism doesn’t make millionaires out of many people, but would working for minimum wage in a shop or restaurant yield the same reaction? “I have friends who are journalists and they don’t make a penny,” one estate agent told us while laughing us out of the house.
Our previous references were doubted
For the past three years, most of us have lived in student accommodation.
These apartments are independently run. We were told these references wouldn’t do because its not the same as having a landlord and that if they affiliated with a college then the references don’t really count.
The majority of us have only ever lived in our family home and students apartments so this meant that in the eyes of some landlords we had no references and without one we couldn’t get an apartment.
They were vague about fixing/changing anything in the house
As expected, many of the houses we viewed weren’t completely finished when we viewed them.
We asked one estate agent if there would be a mattresses added to the beds or whether we would have to supply our own, only to get a reply along the lines of “ehhh yeah.. Im not sure but yeah I’m going to say.. yeah” or when we asked another if there was a security alarm we were told “I think so… probably”.
The partying assumption
Even after tirelessly explaining that we all had jobs which require 6 or 7am starts and that with two jobs we’d never even really be at home, this one seemed to be unavoidable.
We heard things like “obviously the landlord wouldn’t be a fan of parties” and “you’ll have to consider the neighbours if you’re having a lot of people over.”
In trying to explain that with our schedules at the moment, we couldn’t have a party even if we wanted to, we were laughed at as if to say, “you’re in your early twenties, of course that’s what you’re going to be doing.”
Renting comes with many struggles, from high costs to limited availability the problems that come with finding somewhere to live are not exclusive to any one type of person, but being a student or even being young brings with it a whole list of extra struggles.
LISTEN: You Must Be Jokin’ with Aideen McQueen – Faith healers, Coolock craic and Gigging as Gaeilge
