Rising rental costs and a shortage of available properties are putting pressure on prospective renters.
The latest analysis found there were fewer than 1,800 homes available to rent across the country on February 1st.
Daft.ie’s latest report shows that the average monthly price locally is now over to €1,750 a month accross Carlow and Kilkenny.
Kilkenny saw an increase of 7.2% while the figure was greater in Carlow at 8.1% in the last year.
Report author and Economist Ronan Lyons, says its been an upward trend for a number of years. “If we look back, one of the turning points in the market was around COVID.”
“There was a small dip in 2020, really driven by Dublin, but there was a substantial increase then in the second-half of 2021 into 2022 and early 2023, both with the reopening post-COVID and also the influx of people into Ireland from Ukraine in particular.”
“Since then, it’s been relatively steady, the last three years or so have seen rents rising more or less and 4.5% in the years has gone, 3.5% in 2024, 5.5% in 2023.”
“This is not a market imbalance, it’s a market that with these kind of four or five percent increases is telling us that it is short on supply and help in the form of new rental housing is badly needed.”
Mr Lyons believes that there are two things the government could do to eleviate rent pressures: “On the one hand, they need to reform the rent controls to encourage new investment.”
“I think a policymaker would say they have tried to do this, but they’ve made the system more complicated rather than more simple and more certain and the second thing I would say is, going back to the point about viability, is that we need to look both at short-term and medium to long-term measures.”
“It’s not a straightforward job to say, let’s get the cost of building a home down 25, 30%. That’s the size of the task that we have. That will take a number of years with a coordinated push by government. In the meantime, targeted tax reliefs would be a way of getting supply before the costs have been reduced.”
“We can’t wait another five years to solve this problem and we shouldn’t have to wait another five years to solve this problem. We did tax reliefs before, but in a very untargeted way and paid the price. Other countries use targeted tax reliefs to get new rental supply or new social housing supply, and I think we should be looking in that direction too.”
