use a professional agency wherever possible
There wouldn't be much need for one if the legislation were reasonable. The reason a landlord now needs an agent isn't that letting a house is complicated — it's that the paperwork has been made a trap and the penalty for getting it wrong falls entirely on one side.
Look at what the process actually delivers when nobody even disputes it. TR0001417, published in July: tenant in eleven months, paid rent
once, €16,000 owed. She accepted the figure, accepted the notice was valid and said she knew she had to leave. The Tribunal ordered her to repay the €16,000 at €200 a month —
eighty months, interest-free. The final instalment falls in January 2033. Rent was €1,600, so the order recovers one-eighth of a month's rent per month, from someone who paid once.
No fine. No interest. No sanction of any kind. And the instalment clause actually makes the landlord's position worse: without it he could enforce the full €16,000 through the District Court now; with it he can't pursue more than €200 a month unless she misses one. A payment plan imposed on the creditor, for the benefit of a debtor who admitted every cent.
Meanwhile a landlord whose notice is a day out — because he followed the RTB's own published guidance — loses the notice entirely and now faces a class A fine and up to twelve months' imprisonment if he acts on it. And an agent would have made no difference there either. In TR0001481 the landlord used a professional letting agency, properly incorporated and properly notified to the tenant under s.12(1)(e). The agency followed the RTB's guidance to the letter. Both notices were void, and the no-grounds notice — 227 days, compliant in every other respect on the Tribunal's own finding — is gone permanently. Discussed
here.
That's the asymmetry, and no letting agent fixes it.
