Home-owners with spare room have designs on Ikea

The one big problem for the Swedish furniture superstore is that right now no one is buying apartments, writes ORNA MULCAHY.

ARE WE over the excitement of Ikea yet? Did you go there last weekend and nearly get mown down in the stampede for the bedspreads and the Billy bookshelves? Were you carried along in a human tide, past the fitted kitchens, unable to turn back on your tracks? Were you finally forced into the café with no option but to eat those gloopy meatballs? Yes, you were. You, and thousands with you.

By all accounts it was bedlam in Ballymun. We may be on the brink of bankruptcy, but we haven’t forgotten how to shop. After the hype of last week’s opening, the Swedes got the perfect weather conditions for their first bank holiday weekend – long, grey rainy days with nothing for it but to shop. Punters had to queue just to get into the car park. Once inside, people browsed for hours, mostly because they couldn’t find the exit.

For some it will have been a completely new and weird experience – like walking through a three-dimensional version of the Argos catalogue, said a colleague trapped there for most of Monday.

He was new to the Ikea experience and couldn’t believe the nonsense of every single item having its own batty-sounding name, down to the screws for self-assembly. However, it’s safe to assume that many of the shoppers had been to an Ikea before now, either to Belfast (which must have been like a ghost town last weekend) or before that, to Glasgow or Manchester by the busload.

So why get so excited that we now have our warehouse in which to buy cheap beds and frying pans and nice Nordic tea light holders? Because as with Lidl and Aldi, you can get a whole lot of stuff at Ikea and it doesn’t cost very much.

There’s the feel-good factor of doing a very big shop, but less of the guilt.

Ikea is good at the go-on-treat-yourself stuff for a fiver and, so long as you’re not after an heirloom, it is good value – that is if you really need those framed photographs of beach cabins, those CD towers and that swivel chair for the spare bedroom which, due to the downturn, has now become the home office.

The problem is now that everyone will have it. Whatever mystique there was to carting a suitcase of Scandinavian style home from holidays is now over. Everyone can have the same cheap and cheerful style and know exactly what each other’s bathroom cabinet cost.

For some Ikea will be a godsend. It’s an ideal place to go if you need to furnish a flat in a hurry, particularly a small flat, since it has an abundance of scaled-down seating and storage that will fit nicely into even the pokiest rooms.

The big problem for Ikea, though, is that right now no one is buying apartments. When first they came looking to set up in the South, the boom was in full swing and apartment blocks were popping up all over the city, crying out for sectional sofas. In the two years that they spent in planning, everything changed.

The apartment market is now nothing short of toxic, an estate agent told me this week, returning my call from his holiday home in Portugal where he intends to stay until things pick up. Investors are gone from the market, and his clients, who in better days would have sent an assistant to Glasgow to fit out 10 apartments at Ikea in an afternoon, are no longer in business. Banks will not even consider giving them a loan and, even if they could get the money, they would not be buying apartments.

Within a mile or two radius of the Ballymun Ikea, there are hundreds of empty units that are falling in value by the day. The capital has thousands more, most of them in blocks that will eventually pass to Nama. What it will do with them is anyone’s guess. It’s unlikely that it will be able to create a market for these empty units in the short term.

Last week, developer Liam Carroll’s legal representatives claimed that Carroll’s Zoe Group had managed to shift just 39 apartments since the beginning of the year. The group has an estimated 800 more to sell. Nama may eventually have to off-load them so Ikea should get its pitch in now to furnish the lot.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of existing landlords who are finding that with each new tenancy they have to provide some fresh furnishings and no doubt off to Ikea they will go.

The old-style landlady is also making a comeback, as home-owners cotton on to the fact that they can rent out a room, tax free. At Trinity College, student union welfare officer Cormac Cashman says he’s been inundated with calls after the union placed an ad looking for student digs for this coming academic year. His office has taken hundreds of calls from people with a room to spare, who are keen to make an extra €70 to €100 a week. There’s still time to put your name on the list, which will be published on Monday. That will give you the weekend to kit out the spare room.