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GOING INTO ITS third season on Virgin Media Television, the enjoyable Help Me Buy a Home is what you get when you relocate the house-buying shows you’re used to on Channel 4 over to Ireland.

Given the highly charged nature of the housing crisis in this country, a programme that simply showed people looking at homes and buying them would hit a little uncomfortably given this supposedly ordinary process is out of reach for so many.

In that context, it’s no accident that RTÉ’s only real effort at one of these programmes in recent years is literally called Cheap Irish Homes. The title getting out in front of any debate about privilege by essentially saying, ‘relax lads, these homes are cheap’.

The problem with that programme, however, is that the often dilapidated properties shown are rarely bought, leaving the viewer to learn that the sky is blue and having more money will help you buy a more liveable property.

Help Me Buy a Home is different because it does endeavour to show success stories, even if that means the participants are getting big mortgages and stretching themselves financially.

In the upcoming run, presenter and buyers agent Liz O’Kane says there are 12 participants over the series and that nine go sale agreed on the programme, with two more going sale agreed since the shows were filmed.

“All of the participants are pretty broad and varied. To be frank, some of them are coming with cash,” O’Kane says.

You know, not everybody is struggling.

O’Kane’s day job as a buyer’s agent sees her research properties for would-be homebuyers and conduct negotiations if they so wish.

She says the show matches her clients who are predominantly first-time buyers but who also come from different walks of life and circumstances.

She points out that this new series includes somebody with significant needs and another woman who is “downsizing at the age of 78″ after a divorce.

“I felt her story was really, really important because it’s not all about first-time buyers. There’s other phases of life as well, and other things that come along and sometimes surprise us at that stage of life, being divorced and selling a family home and having to rehouse yourself is unbelievably stressful.”

As well as taking in budgets big and small, the show seeks to be relatable to the house-buying experience by mixing the house-hunting with the ducks-in-row practicalities like speaking to mortgage brokers and investigating various grants.

Just like the second series, PJ Kirby and Kevin Twomey of the I’m Grand Mam podcast are the neophytes learning those basics.

In the first series, comedian Michael Fry fulfilled this role and such is the tenseness around the issue of housing that he was forced to defend himself on social media for simply speaking to then minister Darragh O’Brien as part of the programme.

O’Kane is particularly proud that the nuts and bolts of buying a home are addressed in the series, saying she thinks it’s the “only programme that really delivers” on showing “the practicalities and difficulties administratively of purchasing in a housing crisis”.

When asked if it’s getting any easier for people, she’s blunt in saying that it’s not, adding that the term ‘asking price’ really needs to be replaced with ‘launch price’.

Government supports

While politicians and economists debate whether government initiatives like the Help to Buy scheme help people or merely heat the market, O’Kane says it doesn’t really matter from the point-of-view of the advice she gives to people.

She does agree that they’re “certainly not reducing the price of property” but that people would take what’s available to them.

“I would always say to people, don’t be listening too much to what other people have to say about those schemes. There’s always somebody who’s going to give you the negative, always. Paddle your own canoe, right? If that’s what it takes to assist you purchase a property, why wouldn’t you use it?”

Despite what you might think, O’Kane says that doing the show for three seasons now isn’t necessarily good for her business, describing it as “tricky” to navigate both.

“This does not drive copious amounts of clients to me at all. But in a funny way, it’s a little bit like giving back, giving help and guidance and advice to anyone who watches Help Me Buy a Home.”

Over the three years since the show first aired, O’Kane says her client base hasn’t changed that much but that she is seeing more Irish people returning from abroad looking for homes and, interestingly, “Yanks who are calling themselves political refugees”.

Asked to put a number on the latter, she said she’s had “30 this year” coming from the US who’ve sought her help.

“What I do find, particularly with those who are coming from the US, is that America being as vast and as wealthy as it is, and so service-driven as it is, people listen, they take advice, and they pay you, and they buy services.”

Stepping in quickly to clarify that Americans aren’t buying up your average Irish family homes, she adds:

“I’d also just like to say that any of the Americans who are moving here are not looking for the Help to Buy scheme. They’re not looking for three-bed semis in a housing estate. It’s another level of generational wealth.”

And what about the Irish emigrants who are coming home, how do they usually end up calling you for help?

“If you’re living in another country and you are endeavouring to get your foot onto the residential property market, the first step will be the parents and your siblings to go and start looking at properties for you.

“They then get bored out of their brains, and they also don’t know what they’re doing, and they step back. So you’ve made no progress at all. Then they’ll go ‘Googly, Googly, Googly, How do I buy a home in Ireland?’ and hopefully they’ll find me.”

The third season of Help Me Buy a Home will be broadcast in early autumn

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