What on earth is going on with 2021 - 2023 that there are so few tenancies?
Here's a suggestion, put in larger context.
Perhaps people who like data could check it.....:
RTB recently started publishing the "Profile of the Register". with 'cleaned up' data. What they mean by that is that, over the years "phantom" tenancies gradually built up due to tenancies often not being removed from the register after a tenancy ended or, as they refer (iirc) to it "inflation" in the registered tenancy numbers. Once annual re-registration started it provided a way to get rid of the phantom tenancies - so they started this new "clean" publication.
One problem with it is it starts in Q2 2023.
You will see the rising trend in private tenancy numbers. This has been key in convincing the Housing Minister that skeptics of the idea landlords were leaving the market were right - either that talk of landlords leaving the business was either mistaken or a deliberate attempt to mislead politicians and public in order to protect landlords' interests.
RTB Annual Reports show that having been steadily rising, private tenancies peaked in 2016 at about 320,000. They then, slowly, then more rapidly fell to about 220,000 in 2021. But there are various caveats in the data releases to the effect that 2021 figures are estimated to try to take account of a shift in part 4 expiries due to a 2016 chance in the length of them from 4 to 6 years. The falls in the 2022 and 2023 figures were partly due to:
a) actual tenancies going
b) phantom tenancies being removed
c) (common sense suggests) actual tenancies being wrongly removed, only to appear as registrations later - see below
Number of private tenancies, per RTB annual reports.
2012 264,434
2013 282,918
2014 303,574
2015 319,609
2016 319,822 ('temporary' rent control introduced)
2017 313,002
2018 307,348
2019 303,023
2020 297,837
2021 276,223
2022 246,453
2023 223,979
2024 240,946
General inflation in private tenancy numbers would have gradually accrued as every year some ended tenancies would fail to be removed from the register. RTB indicates they reached a peak of about 20k in 2021. The RTB took out it's estimate of an accumulated 20k extra caused by it in the numbers reported that year - 2021. Had that not built up in the first place then presumably there would have been a steadier decline in tenancy numbers from 2016 to 2021 rather it being concentrated in the drop in the 2021 figure.
Likely the effect of that was to mask the fall in the tenancy numbers after rent control was introduced in 2016. Had the data been clean of that accumulation the declines reported up to 2021 would have been even steeper, but ended at the same figure. It was a loss of about 45,000.
Where there is a real break in the data is between those reported for 2021 and 2023. That's when the RTB made mess of introducing a computer system that landlords were legally obliged to use to register their tenancies (and do so annually). It was a fiasco and didn't work (penalties for non-registration were not applied as a result) until March 2024 (penalties reintroduced). Landlords often just gave up as it was often impossible to register a tenancy and the RTB cancelled all late fees.
So throughout 2022 up to early 2024 it is likely unwise to rely on figures an any particular point in time. Although common sense tells us registration numbers in 2022 resulting from the earliest chaos will have been lower than reality, and that the numbers for second half of 2023 and 2024 should be boosted by delayed attempted registrations from earlier eventually getting done.
Another likely problem, that the RTB does not seem to acknowledge anywhere, is that they introduced the Annual Registration requirement at a time when landlords could not actually perform the annual registration since the computer system did not work. But they did (according to what they say in the Annual Report) use the lack of a re-registration to indicate a phantom tenancy and 'clean up' the data. It seems reasonable therefore to assume the trough of 223k tenancies they report for 2023 was at least in part an consequence of deleting tenancies which were real, and got re-registered later on.
That would mean the Profile of the Register series from Q2 2023 would have an initial rise just due to registrations which could not, or were not, made earlier finally getting done.
That initial increasing trend in the Profile of the Register was interpreted as evidence of renewed investor enthusiasm for the Irish Rental market and a tailing off (or to those who prefer "proof it was all just lies") of existing landlord exits.
Somewhere between the figures for 2021 and those for 2024 there will have been a (quite significant) number of genuine 'phantom' tenancies flushed out of the system, but we don't know how many came out when because of the systems fiasco, so the movement in figures 2022 & 2023 are regarded as not terribly reliable outside RTB. The end figure of about 240k for 2024 tho is thought now much more accurate than the 2022 ones, but
the data before 2022 can sensibly be used for trend analysis.
But that pre-2021 data shows a significant and politically inconvenient trend, so it is ignored. Instead the post Q2 2023 showing an initial rise and then mere flattening-out is preferred.
Here's how the RTB described the 2021, 2022 and 2023 figures.
