Kerry number one for home holiday renters!

FRANCES O'ROURKE - Irish Times -

KERRY, then Galway are the two most popular counties with people staying at home for the holidays. A survey of the number of hits between April and June on the holiday homes section of property website MyHome.ie showed that Kerry and Galway attracted the most number of “page views”.

MyHome has over 3,000 holiday properties on its site, about twice the number it had a year ago. Its analysis showed that Kerry, Galway, Wexford and Cork attract most attention from people hunting for self-catering holiday homes to rent.

Counties like Roscommon, Offaly, Longford, Monaghan or Dublin did not feature in the top 10 – although some of these counties offer good value rentals.

Monaghan has houses from €262 a week, Longford from €290 and Offaly from €315 according to MyHome. Self-catering prices ranged up to €5,500 – this is the July/August weekly rental for Sunnybank House in Clifden, Co Galway, a six-bed with an outdoor heated swimming pool which Chelsea Clinton reportedly stayed in.

You could also rent a five-bed Regency house, Lough Ine House, overlooking a lough near Skibbereen, for €2,890 a week.

MyHome managing director Angela Keegan says that while top rents are similar to last year’s. there is overall room for negotiation on rental rates. Most of the people viewing MyHome holiday rentals are Irish – about 86 per cent – with another 5 per cent coming from the UK and 3 per cent of hits from the US.

Tom’s Cottage, a three-bedroom traditional-style cottage in Kenmare, Co Kerry, is for rent from €400 a week. In Offaly, there’s a two-bedroom apartment in a rural area near Edenderry renting at €177 a week; in Ballacolla, Co Laois, a two-bed thatched cottage rents at €322 a week.

Donegal was the sixth most popular destination according to MyHome, and offered good value, with average rental prices from €350 per week

Surprisingly, Co Westmeath was the third most expensive county for holiday lets, after Dublin and Meath, with rents starting from €520 a week.

Fáilte Ireland research shows that in 2009, one in five Irish people who chose to holiday at home chose self-catering accommodation (compared to one in three overseas visitors).

There are 5,700 self-catering properties – 4,000 group schemes and 1,700 individual properties – registered and approved under Fáilte Ireland’s Quality and Standards Framework, which gives self-catering properties a one to four-star rating.

It is not known exactly how many individual properties are offered for rent outside of this scheme.