‘Landlords are bad’, I don’t believe this but the general take on it (in Ireland anyway) is that on some level they are. I don’t know if this is because they hold sway over the place a person calls home for renters, or if it is based on some fact as yet unknown.
One of the most common complaints is about deposit retention, but often this is analogy rather than based on actual numbers.
The actual facts which we can track tell a different story. The Private Residential Tenancies Board (PRTB) figures show that out of 230,000 registered tenancies there were only 958 ‘deposit retention’ cases (2010 annual report).
This represents less than 0.5% of tenancies. Of those 958 cases it broke down like this…
Depending on how you like to look at a chart it can tell you one of two things, that either landlords are generally in the right, or that tenants are. In at least 20% of cases the landlord was fully entitled to deposit retention.
In 42% of cases they were not – …