Rental Properties - house hunting horror stories

mosi

I am currently looking for a house to rent and am absolutely disgusted at the amount of substandard properties on the market. Some recent delights include:

A dark, dingy, depressing house that looked like it had not been decorated since the 1970s. The landlady was quite mad, and told us how a previous tenant had tried to commit suicide in the house. Asking price - €1200

A very dark house with a dirty kitchen, broken curtain rails - asking price €1150

A house with huge damp patches on all of the walls and ceilings - asking price €1150, but originally advertised at €1395

As for all of the "newly renovated" properties that are "furnished to the highest standards". What's worse is that they often have photos that must have been taken years ago, that show the properties in a good light.

It makes me want to scream! If anyone else has some house hunting horror stories, I would love to hear them.

TouchingVirus

Asking price €1800/month for a house on the Hollybank road in Dublin 9. The back garden and under the house had been excavated. There was no insulation between the floorboards and basement at the back of the ground floor - if you looked between the floorboards you could see the sunlight coming in under the house from the sun and the draft was unbelievable; I'd say it was arctic in those rooms at night. The downstairs rooms were bedrooms. The stairs to the basement had been removed and replaced with plywood covering the gap. The stairs to the second floor had no bannisters. The second floor was just a room off the stairs really. The third floor was where the kitchen and living room was. One big MASSIVE room with 20ft ceilings and 10ft windows, a nightmare to heat. The shower/toilet was a cupboard and it had odd bits of wood for a floor including chipboard.

Shocking stuff, and to hear the lad try to sell it like it was worth the 1800 was appaling. I wouldn't have taken that house if it was free

Kimia

I went to look at a flat in Ranelagh many years ago when it was seen as acceptable to offer a total shít hole for well over the odds. One such delight was a flat on the ground floor which was like also something from the 1970's. Horrifying, dingy, dark and miserable with the weirdest mini-kitchen (a single tiny counter with a hob on it, all the electrical connections exposed). Horrible hard brown kitchen chairs were what you were supposed to relax on after a hard days work.

The bedroom was smelly and down a few steps and had 2 grotty single beds in it (how they thought 2 people could live there was horrifying). You couldn't stand up in the bathroom and you had to shower over the toilet, and the door didn't close properly. There was no heating, only electric heaters.

The only reason I went to see it at all is because it was the only '1 bed' under 1000 at the time. I was actually embarrassed for the landlord who was showing it. I was also embarrassed to think that he thought I would think that that kind of living was acceptable. I know that probably doesn't make sense but it wasn't fit for an animal. I nearly was in tears leaving.

edellc

Have a look at daft.ie there are still plenty of substandard accommodations to be had, the laws need to be changed to improve the quality of rentals I know we are being told that prices have come down but still there are some places that the LL should really be paying the tenant to stay in

I did go look at a place on Upper Rathmines Rd a one bed flat which was actually a studio LL was asking for €1000p/m which was a joke really when I pointed out it was a studio he kept telling me it wasnt it was a flat because it had its own toilet I pointed out that gone are the days when the LL rented out rooms and everyone shared a toilet that this was illegal to do now a days he wasnt impressed

jackal

Plenty of nice properties out there too, a bit of common sense required in filtering out the rubbish when you search. Always worth asking a few quesitons when you ring to make an appointment, at which point you can say "ah thanks, but not what I am looking for" and save yourself the time and bother.

• Are bathrooms, washing machines, anything shared with other apartments?
• Does it have a balcony/garden?
• Are the photos recent (I ignore ads without photos for a start)?
• Furnished? Can you take things out if you want?
• Is the bedroom a totally seperate room, or a studio/mezzanine arrangement
• Is the kitchen seperate from dining?
• Gas/storage/oil heating? Gas/elec cooker?

Yadda yadda

Kimia

jackal wrote: »

Plenty of nice properties out there too, a bit of common sense required in filtering out the rubbish when you search. Always worth asking a few quesitons when you ring to make an appointment, at which point you can say "ah thanks, but not what I am looking for" and save yourself the time and bother.

• Are bathrooms, washing machines, anything shared with other apartments?
• Does it have a balcony/garden?
• Are the photos recent (I ignore ads without photos for a start)?
• Furnished? Can you take things out if you want?
• Is the bedroom a totally seperate room, or a studio/mezzanine arrangement
• Is the kitchen seperate from dining?
• Gas/storage/oil heating? Gas/elec cooker?

Yadda yadda

don't think that's the point of this thread Jackal

It's more a horror stories thread methinks.

muireann50

Went to a house just being converted into one bed flats. there was no sink in the kitchen,just holes in the wall.Landlord said oh i wont be able to get a sink in for a bit, thought he meant a week or so, he eventually admitted it would be 3 months til we got a kitchen sink, he said we could use the sink in the bathroom, which was one of those tiny sinks!
Moved into a 1 bed flat in harolds cross last year, bit of a **** hole but was all i could afford during college.around november the walls in the bathroom started getting moldy, eventually went as far as drops of water running down the walls.went home for xmas and when i got back the paint was bubbling and peeling in huge sections off all the walls cos it was so cold and damp.called ll in and he said there was nothing he could do until the summer.he didnt give a ****, what a joke.moved out a few weeks later.

echosound

Viewing a one bed "apartment" many years ago, which turned out to be one big room, with a plug-in electric two hob cooker-plate, a sink, a bed, and what looked to be a big wardrobe but when you slid the door back revealed a shower the toilet was shared with all the other "apartments".

Another "mezzanine apartment" was again a one room bedsit affair, but the bed was on a wooden platform nailed up to the wall over the front door :eek:

Another flat I arrived to view had the agent trying to bundle a rowing couple out the front door, and upon viewing, I found there were holes kicked in every wall and door, and I stood on a piece of carpet which disappeared from under me into a hole in the floor.

A flat I actually ended up renting as a student, the sittingroom-cum-kitchenette had room only for one old-fashioned two seater chair, and if you stretched your feet out while sitting on the chair, your feet would be up against the opposite wall. The lightbulb in the bathroom would drip water from leaking from the flat above, and I lived with the constant noise of the occupants above either fighting or screwing at the tops of their voices (also a TV thrown out the window once).

Mustn't leave out the place where the mattress had a body-shaped stain from where the previous occupant had died in the bed (landlord was taken aback and said no when I asked if they planned on replacing the mattress).

Or the house I lived in for a few months in my very early 20s which boasted a downstairs loo as well as an upstairs bathroom. The downstairs loo was the tiny back yard covered by a sheet of perspex and thus "converted", and the floor was constantly flooded by rainwater and p!ss from a leaking toilet. We left that house when we discovered the gasfire in the livingroom was leaking and slowly poisoning us.

In more recent times (earlier this year no less), I went to view a dark and dingy 3 bed house - the bathroom had faeces smeared on the walls and the toilet itself was overflowing with faeces, the landlord just shrugged and said he hadn't had a chance to clean it up after the last tenants. The beds were in smashed pieces on the floor, the tiny yard behind the house was overgrown to a height of about 10 ft with weeds and creepers covered the whole window of the (filthy) kitchen. There were holes in the floor of the upstairs landing, curtains instead of actual internal doors, and decorations consisted of broken lamps made out of rope, and what looked to be earwax.

Another 3 bed house had wires sticking out of the bathroom wall, wires sticking out of various walls in the hall and kitchen, had ice on the inside of the windows (in May), mould growing on carpets and curtains to the extent that I couldn't draw breath and had to run back out of the house, the showerbase was covered in a mix of earth, cement and rubbish, and the landlord had the cheek to tell us if we had a dog it must be kept outside so as not to dirty the house or cause any smells :rolleyes:

A cottage we viewed was surrounded by remains of a broken farmyard and collapsed sheds, and was overrun with rats.

All 3 of these above-mentioned houses, I was completely shocked and disgusted that any human would even consider keeping farmyard animals in such abodes, let alone put them up on daft and attempt to rent them out to humans for money.
Lesson learned: never even contemplate viewing a property unless the ad is accompanied by extensive photos of both inside and out!

00112984

When I moved to Dublin in 2003, I viewed a "one bedroom apartment" in Ranelagh. It was a very dingy old house converted into four tiny flats and the one I was viewing was €950/month, no parking. It was vile.

The sittingroom had a kitchenette off to the side which consisted of a very old cooker with a sink right next to it, no counter space. The "kitchen" table was a fold-up job like you'd have for camping and was also the coffee table. If you wanted to open the oven door you'd have to stand to the side because if you stood in front of it, you'd hit the backs of your legs off the couch.The floor was springy and the carpet smelled musty and was covered in placed with rugs to cover burn marks and god knows what else.

The bathroom was under the stairs, you'd have to crouch to get at the sink to wash your hands and the shower was over the toilet. The mirror was hanging over the sink and because that was a slanted under-stair wall, the mirror was swinging downwards.

The bedroom was the worse. There was no window. No light at all. The bed was a double and the room was so small you'd have to crawl up from the bottom of the bed because there was no room along either side of it, let alone space for a bedside locker. There was a tattered wardrobe at the end of the bed but you couldn't open the door fully because it hit off the bed end.

It was hideous. When the letting agent asked me if I was interested, I said no way and she kind of rolled her eyes and told me to let her know as soon as I changed my mind because it'd be snapped up :rolleyes:

Ended up getting a really lovely place much closer to town for €50 less a month.

papsita

It's truly unbelievable the crap out there. I just saw a place in Portobello asking for 1250 and it didn't even have a proper bathroom. Another place in Blackpitts asking 1250 that wasn't actually fit for a dog. Not that I had expressed any interest, but the landlady there said she wanted landlord references going years back. I had to laugh. She didn't even have a BER, yet she thought it acceptable to ask me that. I really do think that some of these people are scum.