At the corner of University Street in Belfast, students queue in the summer rain outside a redbrick building where it’s two in and two out.
It is a Tuesday afternoon in late August and the numbers swell at the door of Laird’s estate agents.
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.
Demand for accommodation in the leafy student quarter around Queen’s University Belfast has soared since the end of the pandemic.
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But this year is different from previous years, according to estate agent Dermot Laird.
For the first time, almost half of inquiries for the firm’s 500 properties have come from students living in the Republic.
Letting season is also beginning earlier – viewings start in February but agents are “inundated” from early January – with most houses rented out by March.
“The number of calls from southern mobile numbers making is phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal,” says Laird, who has been in business for 40 years.
“We’ve had folks from Galway, Cork, Sligo, Mayo ... the mobile number is the first indicator and then the addresses and southern guarantors.
“We have always had a lot of demand for Monaghan, that’s a word-of-mouth thing. But this year, by far, is the biggest ever for students from across the South contacting us.
“Maybe the cost of living in Dublin and Cork outweighs that £350 (€404) to £450 you’ll pay each month in Belfast.”
Dubliner Nora Burke stands near the top of the queue with her Queen’s classmate Cara McGinn from Co Tyrone.
The pair are in their second year of a biomedical engineering degree course.
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.
Accommodation was a “pretty big factor” in her decision to come to Belfast, where the rent for her three-bedroom house share is £340 a month.
She is less than a five-minute walk from the university.
“The course I wanted to do was in Galway but it was impossible to get accommodation,” Burke says.
“It was probably three times the cost per month to what I’m paying now.
“We started looking in early January this year ... I don’t really remember what the house is like, it was very stressful going in; we went for five viewings one of the days.
“I think we were just happy to have one.”
The surge in interest is reflected in first-year-enrolment figures at Queen’s and Ulster University.
At Queen’s alone, the number of southern students taking up new places more than tripled between 2019 and 2024, reaching 335 last year.
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.
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.
They collected their keys the previous Friday.
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.
“The majority of my friends stayed living at home and went to Waterford, and some went to Cork, which is really far,” she says.
She is paying £350 per month to share a five-bedroom apartment with “quite a big kitchen”.
“I don’t think I’d get anywhere in Dublin for £350,” she says, smiling.
“One of my best friends is in Galway and she’s in her final year now, and every single year she’s only got accommodation the week before she’s started.
“And she’s always ended up way out of the city, like 40 minutes away.”
Corcoran and her friends say they are excited about the move but admit they were worried and began their search in January.
“We 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,” she adds.
“It was like: ‘If we don’t have a house by March, we’re not going to get anywhere’.
“But I don’t regret it, I wanted to move away. I don’t think I would have went to Dublin – everything is so expensive and you would have ended up far away from everything.
“Up here, everything is within walking distance. I love it.”
