Affordable Rental Properties are Hard to Come by

Rental properties have provided the people of Ireland different options when it comes to living situations. People that cannot secure mortgages for various reasons and therefore are unable to buy a home look into the rental market.

A new Simon Communities Study has found that over 90% of homes available for rent within Ireland are not affordable for people with state housing benefits. The study indicates that the government needs to monitor and strictly enforce rent pressure zones, including the 19 new zones announced today.

The most recent publication of the Locked Out of the Market report found that approximately 8% of properties available on the market to rent were within the housing assistance payment limits. That percentage is drastically smaller compared to the percentage of the population that is using housing assistant payments.

The study found some alarming information that the government needs to take under consideration. Only one property was found available to rent within the Rent Supplement or HAP limits across all of the study areas for a single person. Additionally, only two unites were available within …

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Higher rent supplement, sometimes you just can’t win.

Raising rent supplement is a tricky solution to a housing shortage for a few reasons. Firstly, if you increase purchasing power where there is scarcity it will likely serve to drive up prices generally.

Think about the following scenario, Joe RentSupplement is trying to rent a home that Jim PrivateRenter also wants, what it boils down to is private renters versus publicly funded renters, and in that mix one now has higher purchasing power.

What is the one simple thing the privately funded renter can now do? Raise their price, this is how they outbid the publicly funded renter, Joe  RentSupplement is still out of a place to call home.

What are the solutions? More public housing – but perhaps not with a ‘for the rest of your life‘ tenancy agreement forming the basis of it. The other thing would be to allow increases for tenancies in situ. This last point cannot be overlooked.

Many of the new homeless come from the private rented sector. This occurs when the prices they are asked to pay are beyond their affordability, far …

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Propertypin proves nothing on Rent Allowance (other than that their figures are wrong)

There was an interesting post on ThePropertyPin that I came across on twitter and in reading the analysis I was struck by the statistics mentioned regarding the rent supplement.

For a non-landlord, hearing that ‘rent supplement’ is above actual rents must seem like lunacy, heck, even for a landlord it sounds ridiculous. In particular when the average is 7% above the general asking prices according to the piece. But taking this post on the face of things merely circumvents the truth within the figures.

In fact, in many instance there are several factors at play, such as a local authorities inability to accept ‘asking prices’ as the real price, where these figures are negative it demonstrates that they know the asking price is not the ‘clearing price’ and therefore they can offer the client (rent supplement recipient) far less than that which is dictated by the market.

For instance, in every case given, Leitrim is not giving people enough to rent a property and its the same in Longford. In Longford the average …

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