Would you really want to own an apartment in this country?

Date Published: {J}

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought the reason us taxpayers coughed-up billions to set up the National Asset Management Agency was so that builders who could not get rid of properties, would put the property into NAMA at a reduced price.

So, it was a bit of a surprise during the week to find out that not alone do we now own the property at a knock-down price running to billions, in some cases we actually pay rather fancy salaries to the selfsame builders so that they might use their good offices and connections to help get rid of the property.

In the selfsame week, a report was published saying that we in Ireland would need to build 30,000 new homes per year because of the increasing and very young population. This is in a country where what might be termed ‘villages’ have sprung up on the outskirts of towns and nary a one is living in any of the houses and they have never been occupied.

And, to stretch your credulity further, this was also the week in which someone from NAMA said that they had 2,000 houses on their hands and 6,000 apartments. They felt there was demand for the houses, but there seemed to be no demand whatever for the apartments. They seemed surprised at this.

No one bothered to try to explain the lack of demand for the flats, but could I venture to suggest a few reasons . . . and they’re not linked to the possibility that the prices might fall even further. My theory is that many Irish people are unsuited to living in apartments and are capable of making life a living hell for those unfortunate enough to own one.

I am not going to deal in any detail with the apartment block in Dublin in which the entire roof blew away; nor am I going into detail on the row which is running in many developments over the spiralling cost of maintenance charges against which the owners, or occupiers seem to have little or no comeback as prices rocket.

How many times have I heard stories from unfortunates who invested in an apartment in this town and whose life was a misery because of late-night parties, noise, plastic bags of rubbish left on balconies ... the list is endless.

I have written about this before – there is one rental complex in the city where the tenants simply throw bottles, cans, clothes and anything else that comes to hand, out the back windows and on to the well-kept lawns where, I presume, the hired-in gardeners have to do the clean-up before they mow the lawns and tend to the flower beds and shrubs. 

But the most insidious problem must surely be the complete lack of care for other people’s privacy and space. Loud music blaring into the early hours of the morning is the recurring complaint . . . I know of one couple who had to move because, though they repeatedly asked to have the music turned down, not a blind bit of notice was paid to them.

Nights were a living hell. In the case of another couple, they complained repeatedly to the landlord, but in the end, he said they were troublemakers and asked them to leave. They could have fought the case, but they simply didn’t bother.

As I have written before, Galway is lucky that its ‘accommodation to let’ can count on thousands of students every year, but the students are among the worst offenders.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.