Is this how bad the housing crisis is?

This has been a thing for years now. Clare Daly was in the Dail speaking about it.

I actually can't believe how bad the market has gone post covid. I had a room to rent recently. I was inundated with students. I had nearly 20 enquiries within the first 70 minutes of the ad being put up.

In 2 days the ad had more than 1,000 views.

I was being offered 20% more than the asking rent from people who didn't even view the house in person.

And the problem is going to get worse when the foreign students are let back in. Thousands and thousands of brazilians, argentinean etc students are literally waiting for the borders to open. January/February is when they are seemingly planning to arrive here.

Friend of mine renting a decent sized room out in his house in Dundrum to a couple from Hungary and he's very happy with the arrangement they are nearly always out working and are apparently lovely people. He was inundated with calls when he advertised the room (i think because he wasn't asking enough tbh) but he got a call from a Brazilian girl who offered him sexual favours if he rented to her. He hung up and blocked the number presuming it was someone taking the piss but this has me thinking otherwise. I wonder if people are that desperate now?

Far far too risky to answer that on a phone call!

Suspect it was someone " Taking the piss"

What kind of idiot would say such a thing over the phone ?, type of approach you imagine could only happen in person as much more difficult to prove?

The advice people I know are been given is to go letting agencies and give them a bio, then they will sell you to the landlords. I haven't seen advice to publish your details + rent onto social media.

You have no idea if the person is a landlord or not, it could be any chancer. Plenty of people going around "renting" properties that turn out to never exist or they are not landlords. I would have kept his number and reported to the Gardai, I think once they check into him I doubt he is any landlord.

I wonder where all this magical demand pressure comes from? Why, I wouldn't even be able to infer it from the few posts above. No siree Bob.

The whole situation is an affront to decency, not to mention an insult to intelligence.

Zero surprise if the likes of prostitution and sexual predation are creeping into it. But while the anecdotes and personal experiences are piling high, there'll be nowt statistics or investigation. This is yet another of the invisible costs of this supposed "country".

Scam, scam, scam, in all its entirety.

I don't know your personal situation, of course, but my gods honest advice is to do a severe re-evaluation of your life and it's direction.

It's very difficult, but you have to realise that there is no relief or let-up coming within at least the next decade. This housing crisis is baked in, purposefully and knowingly.

Can you move elsewhere? Can you start over elsewhere? Can you swap careers, swap education?

Living in a dank hole for ludicrous amounts of money that will only increase will leave you where, exactly, in x amount of years? Saving a minute amount of money in order to have the reward of having a ludicrous mortgage tied around your neck for the rest of your life? From the frying pan into an another frying pan?

It is clear, even from a cursory glance, that this country is being run as a business. A business that's being liquidated, to boot. Highest bidder from anywhere gets to play, the government's are going to give them guarantees on their investment and supply the fuel to keep the fire blazing. It's a free for all, and while people are too weak-minded to stand up to this affrontery, despite what their eyes and ears are telling them, nothing is going to change.

This country is up for sale, and it isn't to you. Everything from the double-irish "economics" to the thou-shalt-not-even-broach hysterics of it's migrant "policy" spells it loud and clear. Hence landlords leaving, hence decent people leaving, hence miserable stories accumulating.

Do what's sensible and distance yourself from this scam if you can, no matter the difficulty. Scant consolation in it's complexity, but it's the only remaining sense available in this two faced joke.