I never considered myself to be a particularly spiritual person. I was never a total sceptic, though; I always had a vague sense that there are certain mysteries we may never understand. Notions of fate or serendipity, however, were always beyond me. I was a firm believer in coincidences.
Until, that is, we received a very unexpected phone call from our landlady.
We decided to move to the country on a Saturday. This call came the following Monday. It was pushing the concept of a coincidence to breaking point. It was unbelievable. We never hear from our landlady; she is as hands-off as they come. Yet, here she was, calling us just two days after we made one of the biggest decisions of our, and our children’s, lives.
It was a conversation every tenant dreads. She was advising us of her intention to sell the house. She would be around next week with the paperwork. We have until March.
It was the most extraordinary feeling. This was the house we lived in and loved, the house we often referred to as “our house”. It was the house both of our children took their first steps in, a house filled with so many happy memories. Four of us in the bed reading stories. Bath time chaos. Pizza parties and kitchen discos.
Now it is being sold and we have been asked to leave. It is news that would have in any other circumstance sent us into a pit of panic and despair. But we had just decided to move anyway. This phone call just reinforced our belief we had made the right decision. It was more than a coincidence; it was a sign. The universe was pointing us in the right direction.
Our safety net has been severed, that’s all. We have seven months to buy a house. Plenty of time. Well, we had seven months. We now have five months. The last two months have not gone according to plan. We have realigned our priorities on numerous occasions. In fairness, our landlady assured us if we need a little more time that’s no problem. But why does it feel like there’s a sumo wrestler sitting on my chest?
House prices
Here are some things I have recently learned. Online property searches are up 50 per cent on the same time last year. Despite the pandemic, or perhaps because of it, house prices are rising. Not only that, but houses are staying on the market for a lot less time than they used to. People are snapping them up. In June, a three-bed semi-detached house reached sale agreed after 10 weeks on average. In September it had fallen to seven weeks. There is not enough supply to satisfy demand.
You often hear conversations and debates revolving around the Irish obsession with property ownership. People try to figure it out like it’s a mystery. Socio-economic and historical influences are dissected. Foreign models are compared. John B Keane’s The Field is regularly invoked.
But this is all it boils down to: a simple and profound lack of security on behalf of the tenant. We are blessed with a fantastic landlady. She has never put up the rent – a huge relief after the annual battles with previous property barons. Anything that needs fixing gets fixed. She handed over the keys four years ago and that was that. It is the perfect tenant-owner relationship.
It is her prerogative to sell the house and I don’t begrudge her for doing it. It is, after all, her house, regardless of what we have taken to calling it. But is it any wonder we now desperately want to own our own house? We want any future decisions to be in our hands, not someone else’s.
Why the hell did we have our epiphany to get out of Dodge at the exact same moment as half the country? Why couldn’t we have thought about it just a few months earlier? Right now there is no sign of a house on the horizon. The clock is ticking. To be clear, we are not worried about being booted out on the street come March (we have been kindly assured this won’t happen), but the added pressure now looms like the distant sword of Damocles. I like a good race-against-time story as much as the next guy, but this is all getting too much.
As a new lockdown begins, what can we do but wait? I can’t imagine too many houses will enter that desolate market in the next six weeks. And then after that? I can feel the optimism drain from my soul.
I was not a spiritual man, but now I’m praying for a miracle. Are you there, God? It’s me, Darragh. I know it has been a while, but any chance I could ask you for a favour? No, nothing crazy. Just a house; maybe a garden if you could swing it. I’ll pay you back, I swear.
