‘Your rental market is like the Hunger Games’

For €300 a month you can rent a single room with no wardrobe in Blanchardstown, in north Dublin, but you can only have it from Monday to Friday, as the landlord wants it back for Airbnb lettings at the weekend.

You can have a bed all week for the same price in Harold’s Cross, in south Dublin, so long as you don’t mind sleeping in an open-plan sitting room. “If you are fussy do not bother to contact me,” the ad advises.

In a flat in Ballymun, back in north Dublin, €350 will get you half a double bed, sharing with a student from India. Push the budget to €1,350 a month and you can stretch to an entire bedsit for yourself in Rathmines, on the southside.

Dublin prides itself on being a hub for migrant tech workers, offering high salaries and a good quality of life. But there are signs that its attractiveness may be slipping. Ireland comes 56th out of 67 countries for overall life satisfaction in 2016, according to 14,300 expats surveyed by the InterNations network. We ranked third worst for the affordability of housing and fourth worst for availability.

International tech employees who have spoken to The Irish Times about living and working in the capital consistently cite the high cost and poor quality of accommodation. If you spend any time browsing the rental listings online, there's no mystery why.

“I didn’t know how bad the property situation was,” says Mark Berndt, a 29-year-old software developer.

It is far worse than I had been warned. It's really expensive and really difficult. Trying to find accommodation is like participating in the Hunger Games."

Berndt moved to Dublin from South Africa last October, attracted by the good salaries and relative ease of getting a visa. “After we had applied for my permit I had it in a week,” he says. “But when I got here it took me over three weeks to find a place to live, and that involved me looking every single day.”

Miguel Vilhena, a 32-year-old software development lead with the Version 1 information-technology consultancy, moved here from Portugal in 2013 with his partner, Alexandra Antonio, a banking risk analyst. Even then, he says, it was tough to find somewhere to live.

“I believe it has reached an unsustainable state now,” Vilhena says. “It feels like a jungle where only the strongest survive. People are leaving Ireland because it is not worth it any more.”

He says the situation is especially difficult for single people and families.

In both cases the monthly income may not be enough to cover expenses, and that obviously includes accommodation, but also childcare and healthcare costs."

Even for those moving from the San Francisco Bay Area – known in the US as the place rich people go to feel poor – Dublin’s rental situation comes as a shock.

Finding a place to live was actually the easy part, says Karima Merchant, the 25-year-old head of business development for Europe, the Middle East and Africa for a multinational tech company, who moved here from San Francisco. “I used Daft.ie and found an apartment, very similar to how I used Craigslist in San Francisco. There my rent was significantly higher, and I was getting much less for what I was paying.” But she adds that the “landlord situation out here in Dublin is just terrible. They’re trying to take advantage of you being foreign any way they can.”

“Public auction fight”

One of Vilhena’s colleagues at Version 1, a 32-year-old project manager named Fabio Parente, relocated from Rome four years ago. “It is basically impossible to rent upfront before you move here,” he says. “You have to go in person and give the deposit in cash, and then you’ll find it turns into this public auction fight. You have to be prepared to offer more money than the person in front of you.”

Parente originally lived in a studio in Dublin 8.

It was €700 per month, and then it was increased after six months to €750, with no warning. The landlord told me, 'You accept or you move.' "

He has since escaped the rental nightmare; he and his wife are now living in an apartment they bought, in Dublin 3, and integrating well into life in Ireland. “Compared to Rome, Dublin is slightly more expensive,” he says. “The bills are probably 20 per cent higher. But the salaries are at least double what’s on offer in Italy.”

What would each of them consider a reasonable salary on which to live comfortably in Dublin? The answers range from €45,000 to €60,000 for a single person without a family – well in excess of the average industrial wage in 2016, of €37,097 for a single person or €61,582 for a family. “It could be less, if it weren’t for the accommodation costs that are currently out of control,” Vilhena says.

Three types of tech worker typically relocate to Ireland, according to John Dennehy of Zartis, a tech recruiter that brings highly qualified workers here from all over the world.

“There are senior executives on six-figure salaries,” he says. “Usually, the cost of the relocation – typically around €50,000 – is covered by the company. For them the variance between Dublin and most other European capitals won’t be massive.

“The midlevel software developers come in on a salary of €45,000 to €90,000, which looks really generous. But the cost of accommodation is shocking; the level of tax can be quite high compared to some other countries.”

The third type of migrant, Dennehy says, are those in junior sales and support roles, on salaries ranging from the high €20,000s to low €30,000s. “If you relocated with a family you’re not going to have a good quality of life on that salary,” he says. “But if you’re 23 and your partner is also working, you can be quite comfortable.”

Still, it’s not all about salary.

“Candidates are choosing to relocate here because of how they’re treated,” Dennehy says. “The perks and benefits are very generous, and the large companies are offering free medical care, dental care, stock options, work from home. Those kind of progressive benefits are not found in some other European countries. So Dublin is still a very attractive destination.”

“Amazing opportunities”

Other than the cost and difficulty of finding accommodation, the tech workers who speak to The Irish Times are positive about Dublin's advantages.

For Vilhena they start with a salary two or even three times what he could expect to earn in his home city of Lisbon. “From a professional perspective, some of the biggest multinationals have a presence in Dublin, so it provides amazing career opportunities.”

Low-cost flights to other European cities, the quality of life, and the walkability and “small-town feel” of Dublin are the other main attractions. Vilhena says

The weather and the food are obvious obstacles, but the economy and the society certainly make up for it,"

For Parente and his wife, the cost and logistical difficulty of bringing their dog with them to Dublin was an unexpected challenge. “Your pet must go via cargo, which is superexpensive. It’s also very unsafe,” he says.

Merchant, Berndt and others migrating from outside the EU face additional red tape, such as the need to register for a Garda National Immigration Bureau certificate-of-registration card, which both call a burdensome process. Nonetheless, Merchant says that Dublin is "an easy place to transition lifestyle-wise. I enjoy meeting and socialising with other young people in tech from all around the world. I've found the culture very welcoming and friendly."

Berndt, who found a place to live in Carrickmines, says, “I don’t own a car. I have the Luas on my doorstep. In South Africa public transport isn’t a thing, so that’s been great.”

Overall, he says, he is very happy he chose to live here.

Dublin has a lot of character, and the people are friendly, though it can take time to make friends."

Dennehy says that the profile of the international tech worker is shifting. In the years to come he expects to see a greater proportion relocating to Ireland from outside Europe.

“Anecdotally, we brought in 50 per cent fewer software developers from Spain and Portugal last year, and 150 per cent more from South Africa. For an employer, getting the critical-skills permit can take about two months and costs about €1,000.

“If you want to hire a candidate from Germany, for example, the average notice period is three months, so it can actually be faster to hire someone from Brazil than to bring someone over from Berlin, and employers are beginning to see that.”

Dennehy doesn’t see Ireland’s popularity as a tech hub tailing off any time soon. “Word is out there that Ireland is a friendly, welcoming place. People are aware that Dublin is expensive and accommodation is difficult, but, to put it in perspective, if they’re moving from Stockholm they can’t get accommodation [there] at all.” And, besides, “Dublin is still a hell of a lot cheaper than San Francisco.”