Flats

Seanachai

Can anybody PM me the details of a landlord who rents out bedsits\flats, I know they exist but they're not advertised on the property sites.

Samuel T. Cogley

Seanachai wrote: »

Can anybody PM me the details of a landlord who rents out bedsits\flats, I know they exist but they're not advertised on the property sites.

Nice try (housing) officer... :pac:

Ray Palmer

Bedsits are illegal so you "know" they exist might not actually match with reality. Most landlords sold the properties with some doing them up themselves. As you can't get HAP/RA for them the market mostly disappeared. I'm sure some still exist but very few and most will never come back to the market again once the tenant moves out.

Seanachai

Ray Palmer wrote: »

Bedsits are illegal so you "know" they exist might not actually match with reality. Most landlords sold the properties with some doing them up themselves. As you can't get HAP/RA for them the market mostly disappeared. I'm sure some still exist but very few and most will never come back to the market again once the tenant moves out.

I should clarify I am of course talking about bedsits with their own bathroom, which are legal. I actually overheard two guys talking about some near my work but I couldn't just butt in to their conversation and ask them about it.

I worked all over the city last year and I saw the kitchenettes two storeys up from the back windows of period houses. They're definitely there, they seem to be part of some underground network though. I'm sure some of them are the illegal type, but there's bound to be some that are just considered too shabby to be shown online or through estate agents.

TheBoyConor

There are loads of them in Cork anyway. Usually in old buildings, townhouses and the like that were converted to flats decades ago. A majority of it would be in the older areas of the north site of the city.

A good few are still lived with a long term tenant. Usually it is a middle aged or elderly single man who is happy enough with the set up despite it being illegal because they are getting it cheap and have some sort of security there because no-one else wants it, or in some cases, are happy enough to do without HAP/RAS because they want to keep below the radar of authorities for one reason or another.

Most of them will be in shabby or poor condition and often when a tenant moves out or dies the landlord doesn't replace the tenant and just leaves it vacant because to advertise it would be drawing attention to an illegal rental. Often the landlords of such places have no interest in reletting or renovating the property, possibly due to them hoping to sell the building or as is at some future date, or in some cases, simply have no interest at all in doing anything with the property and will quite happily let it rot once no-one is living in it. They would generally have done bare minimum maintenance and patch jobs.

In some cases then, the landlord themselves might be very elderly and infirm with a limited competence to manage the property in any meaningful way and may not have family or the means to employ an agent to manage it for them. The landlord might be living in another part of the building. There are some places where tenants have not paid rent in ages and the landlord might not be able or even want to address it and just turns a blind eye.

A local authority would often be very reluctant to carry out enforcement on a property such as that described in my account as a lot of the time for the following reasons:
1) the tenant often is content with the housing arrangement and is happy to have a cheap place to live despite it not being in any way luxurious or up to modern standards,
2) if the landlord was prosecuted the renovations needed might be so disruptive that the tenant would be forced to move out and then become homeless and present to the council for emergency accomdation, further adding to the housing crisis.
3) even if a landlord was prosecuted, they are often very old and may not even the have capability or health or state of mind to be able to organise such renovations, let alone the financial capacity to pay for it all.

In the end, taking enforcement action on such properties isn't really worthwhile unless it is an exceptional case of imminent public danger as in cases like that I describe, it would only cause huge hassle to every person involved and not really be able to achieve anything worth talking about.

I know of one place where it was done in the past and the result was that as the landlord themselves was in a nursing home and obviously had no means of doing anything, the council shut the building down and so the building was evacuated. Tenants had to scatter and go into council housing, county home, emergency accommodation, move in with family etc, and the property was simply left to rot where it stood or be vandalised.

I know this from spending some time liaising with rented dwelling regulation and inspection personnell for the coroporation as part of a community group.

Seanachai

TheBoyConor wrote: »

There are loads of them in Cork anyway. Usually in old buildings, townhouses and the like that were converted to flats decades ago. A majority of it would be in the older areas of the north site of the city.

A good few are still lived with a long term tenant. Usually it is a middle aged or elderly single man who is happy enough with the set up despite it being illegal because they are getting it cheap and have some sort of security there because no-one else wants it, or in some cases, are happy enough to do without HAP/RAS because they want to keep below the radar of authorities for one reason or another.

Most of them will be in shabby or poor condition and often when a tenant moves out or dies the landlord doesn't replace the tenant and just leaves it vacant because to advertise it would be drawing attention to an illegal rental. Often the landlords of such places have no interest in reletting or renovating the property, possibly due to them hoping to sell the building or as is at some future date, or in some cases, simply have no interest at all in doing anything with the property and will quite happily let it rot once no-one is living in it. They would generally have done bare minimum maintenance and patch jobs.

I know this from spending some time working in the field of rented dwelling regulation and inspection.

I've done some construction work in some of the buildings in Dublin over the years too, I don't think people realise that there's people inside them in a time-warp. I went to look at one on Clonliffe road years ago and I wish I'd had a smart phone because nobody would believe the description of it. The landlord shoved an old drunk guy in a vest back into his flat because he was staggering around the landing.

TheBoyConor

You're dead right Seanachai. I have seen similar instances to that you describe in big old tenament buildings converted from formerly fine big georgian townhouses. It might even have been the current landlord's parents or even grandparents who converted the buildings to flats many many years ago with little change being made since.

One time I came upon a case where the landlord who also lived in the property was letting to different fellas, usually older men, who might have a mix of mental health or alcoholism problems in exchange for a cut of their dole, or sometimes for free, because he took pity on them because they would otherwise be homeless on the streets and at risk of dying of the cold or whatever. We were told how he would sometimes have to check in on some people now and again to make sure they were still alive and hadn't died of drink or their untreated health problems. I was told how they would sometimes bring old clothes and food in to some of the worse off individuals and, on occasion, have to "muck out" the flat if the tenant was particularly uncaring about hygiene or waste. Sometimes tenants would disappear and would it would later be heard that they had died on the street, ended up in a county home, or had simply vanished off of the radar altogether and their fate unknown.

The bedsits we are talking about here exist in reasonable numbers in the older run down part of our cities. They are often owned and tenanted by those who have been left behind by the rest of society for one reason or another. They are certainly not lived in or desired by millenial IT workers and upwardly mobile professionals, that is for sure.