Ireland's Top Private Landlord Believes Rent Zones Have "Choked" Supply

 

By Evan Dalton

Photo : Fergal Phillips

Ireland’s top private landlord believes Rent Pressure Zones [RPZs] have “choked” the supply of properties, amid potential reform of the regulation by the Government. 


Eddie Byrne, CEO of Irish Residential Properties REIT, who owns approximately 4000 properties in Dublin and Cork, has welcomed the intent from the government to reform current RPZ regulation as he believes it is decreasing the number of available properties for tenants. 


RPZs were introduced into Ireland in late 2016, with the rent cap set at 4 per cent per annum. Annual rent prices were then limited to the lower of the general rate of inflation, or 2 per cent per annum, from December 2021. 


Contrary to this legislation however, a Housing Commission report in 2024 showed that rents for new tenancies in Dublin’s RPZ rose by 6.5 per cent in 2023, while existing tenants saw just over a 5 per cent increase. 


Despite 42 per cent of landlords leaving the market in the 26 months prior to December 2023, the number of private landlords increased by 4.5 per cent in 2024, with the Residential Tenancies Board stating that private tenancy numbers rose by 7.6 per cent in the last three months of last year. 


James Browne, Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, said his “department has requested the Housing Agency to undertake a review which will assess the operation of RPZs and it is expected that this review will be completed by the end of quarter one, 2025.”


Byrne has welcomed the intent to amend the current RPZ regulation, which expires at the end of 2025, as well as the suggested implementation of ‘reference rents.’ Despite this, he told Reuters that there was “not a lot of clarity around what reference rents actually mean and how they would be implemented.”


A ‘reference rent,’ as suggested by the Housing Commission, would implement rental price limits in regards to location and the size of the property. This approach has been both praised and scrutinised, with current renters, such as Mark Finlay, 42, a renter in north Dublin, fears an increase in his rent price and describes the approach as “crazy.” 


The current efficiency of building apartments was also a point of concern for Byrne. "If you look at construction that's happening today for apartments, anything that is going to be delivered in the next few months was started two or three years ago. After that, there is nothing else that's going to be delivered," he said. 


According to the CSO, there has been a 24 per cent drop in the completed construction of apartments in the last year. 


Despite the number of landlords increasing, large scale residential property investment has decreased. Private rental sector investment stood at €1.8bn in 2021 and decreased to €144m in 2024. Canada’s largest publicly traded provider of quality rental housing, Capreit, has stated that they will “never look at Ireland again” to invest in as it is an “untrustworthy market,” their CEO Mark Kenney stated. 


Landlords with 100 tenancies or more in Dublin accounted for 26 per cent of all private tenancies in 2024, an increase from 22 per cent in the previous year. 

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