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MORE THAN A dozen people slept in their cars overnight at a Co Kildare housing estate.
First-time buyers – many with young families – are hoping to compete to buy one of 30 houses on offer this weekend.
Buyers began to queue in their cars from Tuesday in a bid to secure properties at the new Harpur Lane estate located in Leixlip, Co Kildare, near the Dublin county border and just off the M4.
By this afternoon, two days before the house viewing is set to take place, 15 cars containing 19 potential buyers were parked outside the viewing location.
The roughly 25 properties on offer consist of two-bed, three-bed and four-bed homes in Harpur Lane, a housing estate which first opened in 2022.
The two-bed terraces are priced from €460,000, while the three-bed terraced homes start from €495,000. Some of the homes are expected to start at €530,000.
House viewings are set to take place from 10:30am until 12:30pm on Saturday and Sunday, but buyers in the queue expect that the properties will be “snapped up” within the first hour.
“It’s just so demoralising,” Trish, one of the people in the queue, told The Journal.
The woman, who was queueing on behalf of her son, said that he had been trying to buy a home for some time, and was “beaten to it again and again”.
“It’s a bidding war,” Trish said.
“You wouldn’t mind if you got the house. You’d be willing to do this any time if it was a proper queue.”
Trish added that her son was engaged, and the young couple were looking for a “community-oriented” area such as Leixlip to settle down, but said that it had been a “struggle”.
“Leixlip is a growing town, there’s good schools and amenities and great city access,” Trish said.
“I’ve been here since Wednesday. Other people came up today and I had to tell them that there’s already 15 people ahead of them, it’s hard,” Trish added.
One potential buyer said that he had slept in his car overnight with his wife to secure their place in the queue.
“We’ve been to other housing developments before where we’ve queued up and the houses were all gone in five minutes. This is what you have to do.”
“So I’m not leaving this one today. Email notifications about the house viewing here were probably sent to around 1,000 people, it’s a bad situation during working hours but it has to be done to even have a chance at buying.”
Another man in the queue argued that the government “are not building enough houses”.
According to the Central Statistics Office, a total of 30,330 homes were built in 2024, a decrease of 6.7% on 2023.
The government has been widely condemned for the decrease, as former Minister for Housing Darragh O’Brien and Taoiseach Simon Harris had promised voters that 40,000 homes would be completed last year.
Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald said the 40,000 figure was “pure fiction” and a “load of bull”, stating that it was a “trick designed to mislead the public”.
“We have people here who have been waiting for a year, two years, even five years for their first home,” the man waiting in the queue at Harpur Lane said.
“There is not enough houses being built, and that’s the only way to tackle the housing crisis”.
Estate agent representatives took a list of names from those in the queue, promising that they would “work down the list”.
The 19 people in the queue were told to leave once their details had been taken, as several residents had reportedly made complaints about driveways being blocked.
More potential buyers are expected to queue ahead of the bookings this evening and tomorrow.
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