Tenants don’t actually want ‘rent certainty’

This post is written by Karl Deeter in a personal capacity.

I help to manage about 20 tenancies in different buildings, and lately we have been operating a new agenda which is very simple.

We offer leases of between 2 and 5 years. A two year lease comes with no rent review, a five year lease comes with a review in year 3 with a contractual clause that the rent cannot go up or down by more than 10%.

According to the commentary on what tenants want you’d think that people would be jumping at the bit for such terms and conditions? Think again, it has almost universally fallen on its face.

While there are people affected by rising rents, what they don’t seem to want is the time commitment that goes with a lease of longer than one year. Why is this? What is the trade-off?

We do ask why it doesn’t suit and get different answers, some people want to buy a house or don’t know if the will stay in their current job, others just ‘prefer’ one …

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Evil landlords making people live in deplorable conditions

Today I was up near the North Circular Road looking at a pre-63 building. These are properties which have been continuously let out since before the building regulations came in and for that reason they are often divided up into very small units or bedsits. From this year new legislation came in which means that many of them are illegal because you can’t have shared bathrooms and many other structural issues that make the old ‘bedsit’ a redundant property.

You can still let out a full house, somebody could sign the lease then let out rooms to get a similar end result but this isn’t commonplace as the various rooms are not ‘self contained’ in any way (no kitchen etc.).

Another lady was there to view the property and we got to chatting, I asked if she was interested in making it into one normal home as it had been originally, she answered by saying ‘what are you looking at it for?’, to which I answered ‘to let it out to people similar to how it is now’. I should …

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Irish Property Owners Association budget 2013 response

The Budget failed to address one of the key issues for landlords in the private rental sector, who are providing good quality homes for in excess of 600,000 people.

The so called Local Property Tax, billed for the funding of local services, should be collected from the people using the services under the “Users Pays Principle”.  “This perpetuates a blatant unfairness in the system”, said Stephen Faughnan, Chairman of the Irish Property Owners Association. “This situation will inevitably result in rents having to rise, and represents another layer of of continuing unfairness.” Property Owners in the private rental market may now be forced to participate in an unfair tax code.

The only very slight crumb of comfort in the Budget for private landlords is that the inequitable Non-Principal Private Residence Charge and the Household Charge are being abolished, but their replacement with a Local Property Tax just continues the discrimination whereby tenants and a variety of others availing of local services do not have to directly pay for those services, unlike private home owners who may live next door.

In …

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PRTB Price Increase explained (by the Private Residential Tenancies Board)

found out that the PRTB was going to increase the price it charged to a landlord to register a tenancy and decided to email them asking for a justification for it (it’s going from €70 per tenancy to €90 per tenancy). Given that a tenant also benefits from the PRTB I thought it would have made sense to have them pay whatever the increase was over the landlords existing bill but first I wanted to ask why it was happening, my email is below

From: Karl Deeter Sent: 22 December 2010 14:30 To: Registrations Subject: re: change in pricing

Dear Sirs,

Can you write back and let me know what additional service is being offered in return for the additional fee or is it merely a price increase because you have the ability to do so? Sincerely, karl — Karl Deeter QFA, (LIAM)dip Operations Manager

The reply I got is below…..

——– Original Message ——– Subject:     FW: change in pricing Date:     Fri, 14 Jan 2011 08:29:12 +0000 From:     Registrations To:     karl deeter

Dear Sir,

I refer …

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