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Comment by CalRobert | Hacker News Reader

Buying a thatched cottage in Ireland. It's very pretty, and it checks all the boxes (bike ride from train station), etc. but Ireland's insanely strict protection rules and ridiculous insurance payouts have resulted in every insurer of thatched buildings leaving the country. Additionally, when I applied for permission to build a separate house on the land (it's a few acres) the heritage officer insisted we only build an extension, despite neighbours being permitted to build separate houses on their land, in order to force us to live in the house and "preserve" it. It's a very Irish approach. I extended it just in time to find the extension (and original cottage) completely uninsurable, so unmortgageable, so effectively worthless. A quarter million euro to have a beautiful unsellable unrentable house.

Good discussion of this at https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/oir-media-hourly-files-r2...

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That creates a remarkable set of perverse incentives akin to what's seen in Australia, where restoring old houses properly is so expensive that they tend to be left to rot and/or mysteriously catch fire instead. Is the issue widely known?

A similar thing happens in the USA with houses declared "historic". It's well known among realtors and other groups, but not extensively known. Some states/localities have funds to somewhat help with maintenance, but they get depleted very fast, and you often have requirements like "cannot replace the switches with modern ones, must use push button switches" and similar things.

https://www.houseofantiquehardware.com/shop-by-type/vintage-...

At $15 for a switch vs $1, those things start to add up.

In some poorer places it gets so bad the fire department will basically "wink wink" tell you how to burn your house down.

Other areas have a much nicer version which is "remain visually similar" - basically you can't change how the house looks from the street but you can do whatever you want/need inside.

This has been ironically known to happen on government property as well, where you might expect more desire to preserve historic property. Instead of fixing them, they may just be left to deteriorate until they can be razed and something more modern built on the site.

Lots of nosy old biddies eager to play with someone else's budget.

yeah, gosh, it'd be a shame if the house were damaged such that it lost its heritage status.

The neighbour offered to accidently back his tractor in to it...

Maybe this is a stupid question, but why is it unrentable?

Could you AirBnB it?

I don't think it's a good idea to do that without insurance, personally. Though paradoxically if it burned down it probably would be worth more. I'm more worried about personal liability if someone hurts themselves.

Doesn’t Airbnb provide insurance?

With no insurance?

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