Responding to the Notices of Termination issued by the RTB, IPAV, the Institute of Professional Auctioneers & Valuers, said the fact that private landlords continue to flee the market with more than 58 percent of the terminations in Q4 being for reasons of sale, is unsurprising given that private landlords are being demonised.
“The recent debate on the eviction ban was an absolute disgrace in the way it set landlords against tenants. Most landlords have very good relationships with their tenants and would stay in the market were it not for the fact of an uneconomic return, particularly for those who are well below market rents and for whom the Rent Pressure Zone legislation means their properties are being devalued in that they have no sale prospect to other investors.
He said the eviction ban did not work for tenants. “It simply serves to build up the number of evictions taking place around the same time and increases the desire of private landlords, already reeling from an avalanche of regulation of recent years, and the threat of further to come, to leave the market,” Mr Pat Davitt, IPAV’s Chief Executive, said.
He said policy makers at Government level and particularly those serving them in the public sector “need to interrogate data on housing more closely, so that they are not vulnerable in their decision making to mock rage and the denigration of private landlords.”
Mr Davitt said the Government decision to amend the housing assistance payment (HAP ) to guarantee payment to landlords where the tenant defaults on payment of their contribution to HAP, something IPAV had campaigned for over several years, was unbelievably unfair to landlords.
“It typified some of the craziest aspects of the mountain of new regulation introduced in recent years,” he added.
Where a HAP payment was in place and a tenant defaulted on their contribution to the rent, the Local Authority part of the rent payment immediately stopped.
“When this measure was introduced in recent years it marked the outsourcing of all State social responsibility in this area to private landlords with huge losses of rental income being incurred by them until such time as they could recover their properties by going through a process that was then also elongated by new government regulation,” Mr Davitt commented.
Mr Davitt said he expected that last week’s measure will encourage some landlords to stay in the market.
“However, that is only a small part of the equation. The measures promised by Government for the Budget, including taxation measures, will be crucial,” he concluded.
