I was being sarcastic !
RTB told landlords posting date = service date. The High Court says it doesn't. Accommodation providers set up to fail?
- Thread starter stormy
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OMG, it's unbelievable. So anyone who sent in a rent review incorrectly (by post) could be potentially in a mess. My goodness, let's say you sent in the rent review two years ago, and let's say we get to 2030, does this mean if a tenant is in dispute with you, and they go to the RTB, that it could be ruled that your Rent Review from 2024 would be invalid as it wasn't 'served' on the tenant and the RTB on the same day ! Christ on a bike !!
I'm not sure if that's more sarcasm! The RTB is in the High Court defending its own tribunal determinations on a regular basis - it instructs solicitors and briefs counsel as a matter of routine. It has an internal legal function (headed by Janette Fogarty), the Board has always had legally qualified members, and a good chunk of its adjudicators and tribunal members are practicing solicitors and barristers. It's adjudication / tribunal arm have (albeit limited) functions and powers of a judicial nature.
This is a statutory body with one of its core businesses being to ensure validity and service of notices. The same-day requirement has been on the books since 2020. The idea that it had no lawyers, or no access to lawyers, to spot that its own guidance contradicted the legislation simply doesn't hold up. If anything, the legal resources at its disposal make years of misleading guidance harder to defend.
A rent review done before 1 March 2026 won't be void on the same-day point, because there was no requirement to serve it on the RTB back then (never mind same day). That rule only arrived on 1Mar26.
The one thing that could bite on an older posted review is the 90 days notice. If it went by post, you can't be sure what date was recieved, so proving the tenant actually got the full 90 days before the new rent took effect gets shaky.
Yes it is. I did a rent review recently with the new system. Navigating the RTB website and doing everything took me about 2 hours and I tried to read their pages in details, had issues finding the calculator, took a while to understand that my RTB login and password didn't work in their service center but that I needed to create a new one. Then I decided to send everything by email to my tenants instead of dropping the notice to make sure I had a written proof. And before sending everything to the RTB, I asked my tenants to confirm they had received the email by WhatsApp. All that, for an additional 25 Euro a month. To me there's no sensible reason to explain the same day issue. Just trying to tie the process into knots.(It took actually longer than that because after the 2 hours I discovered I had made a typo mistake on the area of the property, phone the RTB, was told I needed to sent everything again... )
The whole idea is to prevent any increases in rent at all, no matter how small. Ensure you have to spend a whole day filing in, uploading and serving forms. Get it wrong, and you're facing possible criminal liability for an increase of a little more than €12 per month after tax.
Also shows the bias towards the Institutional landlords. IRES Reit will have plenty of staff whose sole job is to deal with the rent setting forms.
All this is a trap for the small landlord.
Yes of course I was being sarcastic, obvioiusly I'm not good enough at it ! Thank you for the insightful knowledge on how much legal advice the RTB has.
At least that is good news on the Rent Reviews.
Which one is the 90 days notice? Of Rent Review?
Once you put a euro value on your time or engage a professional to do that for you, it is just unnecessary increased costs.
The legislation is so convoluted it makes sarcasm genuinely impossible to detect. And that's the real problem: there will be at least some rent reviews issued since 1 Mar 26 (and possibly rent-setting notices too) where the landlord posted them, and a tenant could well bring a case in 2030 arguing the notice was invalid for want of same-day service. If that succeeds, the landlord is looking at years of backdated overpayment refunds. The RTB's head of Investigations & Sanctions indicated only last week that incorrectly set rents are a focus, and that they could look back as far as 2019 (which makes sense - that's when the I&S powers commenced).
Correct. So if a tenant did not get min 90 notice from date of service of the notice - it's invalid (even pre 1Mar26 rent review notices). The issue is that the RTB told us all date of date of service was date it was sent, but now its pretty clear it was always date received.
Yes, I was actually reading through a few recent disputes on the RTB website (giving myself more anxiety in the process!), and found a recent determination that the landlord had to refund the tenant €3008 after the tenancy had ended, because in his most recent rent review he had only given 90 days notice from the date he posted the letter (10th January), and the tenant only received the letter on 14th January. I expect we'll see a lot more of these in future, particularly as it now also has to be served on exactly the same day as to the RTB.
https://rtb.ie/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/TR1225_Tribunal_report1.pdf
And therein lies the crux of the problem.
Thanks @Wavelly
Exactly illustrates my point.
Exactly illustrates my point.
It's truly extraordinary. This Tribunal sat two months before Argutinski v RTB and still ran with receipt as the date of service - contradicting the RTB's own guidance. Hard not to conclude some inside the RTB already knew the guidance was wrong, and saw the High Court loss coming.
LarryScott
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Another option would be to just keep trying until it works.
Send by registered post with a delivery receipt. If they land on a different day, resend.
You could possibly include in the 2nd NoT that the first NoT should be disregarded as invalid.
Be careful what you wish for. They could send a letter to all tenants to check their notices service date against the date the RTB received it.
Most future notices will presumably follow the RTB's latest recommendations, so they won't be affected. Though it isn't guaranteed that someone checks the latest one each time.
Hopefully, if the tenant didn't appeal and accepted the notice, they can't go back.
They would have to have some evidence that they received the letter on the wrong date, I think.
If the landlord posted both on the same day and the tenant has no record of the date of receipt, then hopefully, there is no claim.
Alternatively, the burden of proof that they were served the same day could be placed on the landlord.
Possibly.
Landlords should check the service dates, if they can.
Most times two registered post letters should take the same time, so the notice would still be valid.
If they are different on their delivery receipts, it might be worth re-sending the notice.
It is very possible that tenants will be advised to claim that they didn't receive on the same date. The RTB likely would put the burden of proof on the landlord. If his delivery receipts are for different dates, then it is an easy invalidation.
In the end, resetting the time might be better than waiting until a hearing and then having to reset the time at a later date.
Also, landlords who submitted a claim against their own notice and got a ruling that their notice was valid should hopefully be safe. Maybe tenants will be allowed to appeal on the grounds that the rules have been changed (clarified).
The RTB are clear that their recommendations are not legal advice. A government body shouldn't be allowed to do that really.
A small silver lining.
Up until now, had you argued receipt before an RTB Tribunal, you'd have lost hands down.
What a mess and this is just the procedural aspects of the Residential Tenancies Laws. The actual rules themselves are another morass again.
If you raise the rent, there must be at least 20 ways and counting that you can go wrong.
Not necessarily, a determination order can be appealed on a point of law (which this is)
I'm not sure I understand this. Their website guidance was clearly misleading. They adjudication and tribunal functions need to apply the law. They have been applying the law incorrectly since 2020 as they interpreted date of service as date posted, not received.
I guess its important to have a sense of humor when dealing with the RTB!
Please don't panic! If there's a problem with service of a document but there's no dispute it was sent, the RTB may be able to apply the "slip rule". It doesn't mean a document is invalid.
The important thing is there is no ambiguity about the date the notice was sent / posted / emailed or left with the tenant and the RTB. It's important to be clear and accurate about the date something was done.
The important thing is there is no ambiguity about the date the notice was sent / posted / emailed or left with the tenant and the RTB. It's important to be clear and accurate about the date something was done.
I doubt very much that serving the documents on a tenant on a Monday and on the RTB on a Tuesday would be treated as a slip. The website is very clear - both must be served on the same day.
This is to trip up landlords, they will not be giving us the benefit of the doubt.
In the case that pointed up these errors by the RTB, the Slip Rule was not so applied to the date of service, and the judge said he was not making his decision based on that error alone, he did not say that error wasn't sufficient to invalidate the notice.
Here's what the RTB say about application of the Slip Rule.
"only allowed if the mistake: Does not significantly affect the validity of the original notice"
(see below)
There also apperas to be inconvenient case law including things like Dowling & Ors v Ireland & Ors [2019] IEHC 38 where the High Court emphasized that the slip rule cannot act as a rescue mechanism for a litigant's procedural missteps.“The slip rule cannot be used as a vehicle to seek to revisit a substantive decision or to put forward a new argument... It is not a mechanism to enable a party to change litigation strategy or to cure an omission which was the result of a deliberate choice or a misunderstanding of the law.”
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