Are landlords really fleeing the Irish housing market?

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We keep hearing that landlords are leaving the rental sector in droves, but is this actually the case?

The stories we tell about housing matter. Stories make some courses of action, such as potential policy fixes, seem impossible or foolhardy, and make others feel like common sense. They are how we make sense, as a society, of the complexity and competing agendas within our housing system.

However, new Census data for 2022 was released this summer, suggesting that there in fact 330,000 households in the private rental sector, 54,000 more than the RTB data. This suggests that that the number of dwellings rented from a private landlord has increased by 7% since 2016. This includes increases in all four Dublin Local Authority areas.

The third is the most important issue. The number of approved housing bodies tenancies has increased quite significantly since the last census, but the number of households categorising themselves as such in the census doesn’t appear to reflect this. On the other hand, it is not clear why these tenants would all of a sudden start making this mistake when completing the census form, given this has not been an issue in the past .

Since that year, rent limits have been introduced , the length of tenancies has been increased and the RTB have been given much stronger enforcement powers to tackle non-compliant landlords. International evidence suggests that non-compliance can increase as regulation grows, as more landlords seek to operate in the ‘black market’ in the hope, for example, of evading rent regulations.

However, regardless of whether or how landlords exiting the market impacts supply, it definitely does impact their tenants because tenants are almost universally evicted before sale of property . This issue is particularly complex, but it’s worth drilling down into. Rather than focusing on whether or not landlords increase the supply of housing, lets focus on how the private rental sector impacts the supply of housing, as this can make the issue easier to get our heads around. The existence, and size, of the private rental sector impacts supply in the following ways:

The private rental sector creates an investment opportunity for institutional landlords. These landlords can access finance from financial markets, and turn that finance into investment to purchase properties. Note, they usually do not build any houses themselves, but they do purchase newly built stock. This form of investment is directly related to supply, because the existence of institutional landlords makes it much easier for developers to sell newly built apartment blocks.

 

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