Reports: Government will retain rent controls for existing landlords but lift them for new investors

faketales said:
While difficult to compare because of different controls it seems clear to me that it is the rental sector which is in crisis.
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Of course it is........the rental sector is the real health check for the supply-demand equilibrium or imbalance of any country or region's housing sector......rents are the best 'signal' any market has re: supply/demand......because tenants pay for the product using their own monthly cash flows....the prices are being set unconstrained by any external factors (excusing price controls themselves).

How do people pay for houses that they own?......mainly with bank loans.......which are a function of incomes and lending multiples permitted by banking regulators.....so house prices in Ireland is not where one should look for dysfunction or health in the housing market....put simply house prices in Ireland are pretty much anchored by incomes (sure some cash buyers and bank of mum and dad inflation things beyond this at the margins) but the gravity of house prices in Ireland are constrained by incomes and lending multiples.

The rental market outside of RPZ tenancies is where all the SIGNAL is.......and that signal is telling us what we know already.......unsupported private rents (non-HAP, non-AHBs) are consuming larger and larger chunks of median household disposable income....housing for most adults is not a consumer discretionary item.....its a consumer staple....rents will continue to rise as long as the supply/demand dynamics continue to deteriorate.

It's why the RPZ introduction was such a cowardly move by the politicians couched as it was in the language of helping citizen renters.....lets be clear.....the RPZ wasn't introduced to help renters....it was introduced to help the incumbent politicians of the day sidestep the embarrassment of extreme rental price inflation which they knew was the true real time scorecard on what a poor job they we're doing re:housing supply. What made it doubly toxic (apart from its nakedly political motives) is that removing the price signal itself meant housing supply was going to be impaired (and it was)....they then doubled down on the cowardice during COVID by capping RPZ increases to 2% when CPI was heading towards 10%). In doing so they nuked the market.

As we head to 2026 - you are looking at a full decade of policy mistakes by the ruling parties....and IMO they've blown it now with these reforms.....and so they'll fail to meet their housing targets and will have no story to tell at 2029 election....and you'll get a government of the left in power then that goes down the socialist housing route which will be a double disaster......and there you have it 2016 to 2036 in a blink of any eye.....20yrs of political incompetence to deal with a problem completely within our own domestic control.
 
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Sister Sara said:
Exactly! So why is there such an emphasis on getting landlords into the market when they do not actually create any stock? They simply compete with prospective owner-occupiers for the same property.
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Emphasis from whom?

Owner occupiers simply compete with renters for the same property. Why not have everyone rent and then there would be no conflict.

The reality what's causing them to compete is lack of supply. Not landlords.

All your suggesting is robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Nothing will change until there is economic downturn that cools demand. Or a massive political change. Neither seems likely in the short term.
 
AlbacoreA said:
The reality what's causing them to compete is lack of supply. Not landlords.
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Well the nature of the property market is such that the rental stock and owner occupier stock is always 'competing'......but competing is the wrong word cause that suggests some kind of zero sum game going on.

The property market (rent/own) is not zero sum when you zoom out and consider the job to be done is putting a rough over someone's head.....rented or owned property achieves that.

What changes over time is the allocation of housing stock to each sub-market....the rental market, the owner occupier market......in a normal market price does an outstanding job of allocating to each based on the real time market need - if rents get too high (cause demand is high and supply is low) such that higher yields are achievable in the rental sector enterprising individuals will buy owner-occupied homes and convert them to tenancies......if rents start to slip suggesting weakening demand and oversupply in that sub-market.....the opposite occurs....landlords sell up....and a rental unit becomes an owner-occupied unit again.

You mess with price signals at your peril...which is what we've done......I can assure you Mr.Market can do a better job allocating housing stock in real time better than Simon Harris, James Browne, the LDA or Eoin O'Broin can.

Indeed my guess on all this housing meddling (without any data to back it up simply intuition) is that RPZ v1.0 and then v2.0 has misallocated supply away from the rental sector into the owner-occupied sector (all things being equal). Which is say that rents (non-RPZ rents) are higher than they would otherwise have been minus any government meddling and all things being equal house prices would be a little higher. (but constrained overall by what I've said above - Incomes X lending multiples) RPZ meant that the full fire of the aggregate under-supply problem was channelled into the rental sector and into market set rental rates.
 
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letitroll said:
Well the nature of the property market is such that the rental stock and owner occupier stock is always 'competing'......but competing is the wrong word cause that suggests some kind of zero sum game going on.
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I remember times (because it's cyclical) when houses for sale were not snapped up, and would sit for months even a year unsold. You could leave a rental and have found another within a few hours. No queues nothing.

No talk of one market Canabilising the other then.
 
letitroll said:
they'll fail to meet their housing targets and will have no story to tell at 2029 election....and you'll get a government of the left in power then that goes down the socialist housing route which will be a double disaster
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If this is a centre right government then what’s the difference between it and a centre left government?

Basically the government are trying to tell new investors “don’t worry RPZ don’t apply to you, we understand what you need to invest” while at the same time supporting RPZ across the country.

The government had no problem placing existing tenancies in RPZ in 2016. Or capping them in 2020.

Would you trust the guarantee from this government that the development you green light this year won’t have different rules in three years time under this government.

I wouldn’t.
 
There seems to be some kind of rent reset mechanisms. However there is no clear explanation yet on how it works and if it's for rpz or new builds.
The only mentioned is that it would not apply if previous renters were given notice to quit.
 
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