{"id":38469,"date":"2025-09-02T11:16:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-02T11:16:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/38469\/"},"modified":"2025-09-02T11:16:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-02T11:16:10","slug":"southern-students-search-for-lower-rents-in-belfast-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/38469\/","title":{"rendered":"Southern students search for lower rents in Belfast \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the corner of University Street in Belfast<\/a>, students<\/a> queue in the summer rain outside a redbrick building where it\u2019s two in and two out.<\/p>\n

It is a Tuesday afternoon in late August and the numbers swell at the door of Laird\u2019s estate agents.<\/p>\n

Deposits are collected and house keys handed over to new tenants by staff loudly issuing instructions from behind glass panels over the ringing of office phones. <\/p>\n

Demand for accommodation in the leafy student quarter around Queen\u2019s University Belfast<\/a> has soared since the end of the pandemic. <\/p>\n

But this year is different from previous years, according to estate agent Dermot Laird.<\/p>\n

For the first time, almost half of inquiries for the firm\u2019s 500 properties have come from students living in the Republic.<\/p>\n

Letting season is also beginning earlier \u2013 viewings start in February but agents are \u201cinundated\u201d from early January \u2013 with most houses rented out by March.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe number of calls from southern mobile numbers making is phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal,\u201d says Laird, who has been in business for 40 years.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve had folks from Galway, Cork, Sligo, Mayo … the mobile number is the first indicator and then the addresses and southern guarantors. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe have always had a lot of demand for Monaghan, that\u2019s a word-of-mouth thing. But this year, by far, is the biggest ever for students from across the South contacting us.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe the cost of living in Dublin and Cork outweighs that \u00a3350 (\u20ac404) to \u00a3450 you\u2019ll pay each month in Belfast.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dubliner Nora Burke stands near the top of the queue with her Queen\u2019s classmate Cara McGinn from Co Tyrone.<\/p>\n

The pair are in their second year of a biomedical engineering degree course.<\/p>\n

Burke is anxious to collect the keys for her house in the Holylands student area; the last time she saw it was six months ago.<\/p>\n

\"DublinerDubliner Nora Burke (left), a student at Queen\u2019s University Belfast, with Cara McGinn, her classmate from Co Tyrone. Photo: Sean\u00edn Graham <\/p>\n

Accommodation was a \u201cpretty big factor\u201d in her decision to come to Belfast, where the rent for her three-bedroom house share is \u00a3340 a month.<\/p>\n

She is less than a five-minute walk from the university.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe course I wanted to do was in Galway but it was impossible to get accommodation,\u201d Burke says.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was probably three times the cost per month to what I\u2019m paying now.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe started looking in early January this year … I don\u2019t really remember what the house is like, it was very stressful going in; we went for five viewings one of the days.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we were just happy to have one.\u201d<\/p>\n

The surge in interest is reflected in first-year-enrolment figures at Queen\u2019s and Ulster University<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At Queen\u2019s alone, the number of southern students taking up new places more than tripled between 2019 and 2024, reaching 335 last year.<\/p>\n

Ulster University said its first-year intake from south of the Border increased from 265 to 629 across its four campuses at Magee, Coleraine, Jordanstown and Belfast, during the same period.<\/p>\n

Ellen Corcoran from Kilkenny is walking down University Street carrying a cardboard box filled with magazines and laughing with her new housemates at lunchtime on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

They collected their keys the previous Friday.<\/p>\n

Corcoran was the only person from her year at school to travel North to study; she is entering her second year at Ulster University, where she is studying communication management and public relations.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe majority of my friends stayed living at home and went to Waterford, and some went to Cork, which is really far,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

She is paying \u00a3350 per month to share a five-bedroom apartment with \u201cquite a big kitchen\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think I\u2019d get anywhere in Dublin for \u00a3350,\u201d she says, smiling.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of my best friends is in Galway and she\u2019s in her final year now, and every single year she\u2019s only got accommodation the week before she\u2019s started.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd she\u2019s always ended up way out of the city, like 40 minutes away.\u201d<\/p>\n

Corcoran and her friends say they are excited about the move but admit they were worried and began their search in January.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe signed on February 20th. But there were a few weeks when we went for viewings every single day, it was three viewings a day sometimes,\u201d she adds.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was like: \u2018If we don\u2019t have a house by March, we\u2019re not going to get anywhere\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut I don\u2019t regret it, I wanted to move away. I don\u2019t think I would have went to Dublin \u2013 everything is so expensive and you would have ended up far away from everything.<\/p>\n

\u201cUp here, everything is within walking distance. I love it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the corner of University Street in Belfast, students queue in the summer rain outside a redbrick building…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":38470,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[663,79,12552,2190,18,19,17,29624,1420],"class_list":{"0":"post-38469","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-belfast","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-classroom-to-college","11":"tag-cost-of-living","12":"tag-eire","13":"tag-ie","14":"tag-ireland","15":"tag-queens-university","16":"tag-students"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38469\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}