Modest rise in number of properties to rent contradicting industry claims
This is in contrast to claims from property owners who claimed the controversial new rules would lead to a contraction in the market.Property portal Daft.ie said the increase was modest and only partially offsets a sharp fall in listings in the months before the rules came into effect.An analysis undertaken by Daft found that the number of homes available to rent nationwide stood at 2,461 at the start of this month.This is an increase of about 5pc year-on-year.By contrast, on January 1, there were fewer than 1,200 homes available to rent. That was a fall of almost 50pc year-on-year.Daft said this means that availability is back to levels seen a year ago, before the new rules were announced, availability remains far below pre-pandemic norms.In the period between 2015 and 2019, before the pandemic, the average number of homes available to rent nationwide in early spring was around 4,366, almost double current levels.But the figures show big regional variations.Availability in Dublin is down slightly year on year.But in the four other cities – Cork, Galway, Limerick and Waterford – availability increased from 178 homes in April last year to 285 this April, an increase of 60pc.The rise in the homes available to rent at any point in time reflects an increase in the homes being put up for rent.Between the announcement of new rules in mid-2025 and the end of January 2026, the number of homes put up for rent nationwide was 10pc lower than in the same period a year earlier.Today’s News in 90 seconds, Wednesday April 15This means there were about 2,300 fewer homes put up for rent in that period.Over the last two months, however, as the new rules came into force, the number of homes put up for rent increased. During February and March, there were 7,225 listings nationwide, an increase of just over 900 on the same period in 2025.The new rules that came in on March 1 mean that new tenancies from that date must be for six years.Under the new legislation, landlords can only re-set the rent where it is below market rate at the end of each six-year tenancy.But this is only if the previous tenant left voluntarily, or breached the tenancy agreement.Smaller landlords have complained that the rules are too restrictive.Commenting on the Daft.ie report, Ronan Lyons, Professor in Economics at Trinity College Dublin, said: “When new rental rules were announced last summer, the government took the unusual decision to postdate their introduction. This gave landlords whose tenants left the option of waiting until new rules came in.“Since then, it has been unclear if the fall in numbers of homes being rented reflected landlords waiting or landlords leaving the market.Prof Lyons said the Daft new figures suggest that holding off cannot explain the full decline in rental listings since last summer.
