"Top 20 landlords get €5m in State rent subsidy"

Top 20 earning landlords get €5m in State rent subsidy

One landlord received €578,000 from the State in the form of rent supplement payments last year.
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The income levels suggest some of the top 20 earning landlords received rent supplement in respect of up to 100 or more flats or houses.

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Is this correct? Is rent supplement now paid to landlords? I thought it was paid to the tenant.

From the article

Rent supplement – which costs the State €400 million annually – is typically paid to people on low incomes or on social welfare who cannot afford to pay the full cost of their rent, and is passed on to the property owner.

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It's a bit of journalistic shorthand Brendan - as jdwex pointed out, it's made a bit clearer further down the article (and there's a quote from a spokesman for the Minister which states that there is no contract between the Department and landlord).

Some areas pay rent supplement directly to landlords but it's not a requirement of the scheme.

gipimann said:

It's a bit of journalistic shorthand Brendan -

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It's an outrageous headline if the money is not paid directly to the landords. In fact, it is outrageous even if it is paid to landlords.

By the way, it's the front page headline story.

Why don't say "Tescos receive billions of euro government subsidy"? because a lot of social welfare is spent on food?

0r "Publicans receive hundreds of millions in drink subsidy"

Or "tobacco companies get €300m government subsidy"?

Many landlords avoid taking on social welfare tenants because they see them as less reliable. This sort of headline and negative attitude to landlords will contribute to a reduction in the amount of accommodation available for social welfare tenants.

Brendan

It is a pointless article as there is no correlation to value for money. This could be the best or worst €5m that the state is paying. The is no information on the number of units, people housed, quality etc. etc. Are the housing groups such as CLUID classified as landlords?

A slow news day and empty newspaper columns create this sort of content, it is unfortunate that this is now common in the Irish Times.

And the article incorrectly says that the rental income is guaranteed.

The scale of rent supplement payments has prompted calls for the Department of Social Protection to arrange deals with individual landlords, given that the State is providing them with significant sums of guaranteed rental income

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There is nothing guaranteed about the income. If the tenant refuses to pay it over, the landlord has no claim on the state. In fact, if they report that they are not getting the rent, the state stops paying the supplement to the tenant.

So it's repeated

The scale of payments has prompted calls for the [broken link removed] to arrange deals with individual landlords, given that the State is providing them with significant sums of guaranteed rental income.

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Under the Rental Accommodation Scheme, the contract is between the landlord and the local authority(?), so the rent is guaranteed and is reduced accordingly. But the rent supplement has no element of guarantee about it at all.

Brendan Burgess said:

Under the Rental Accommodation Scheme, the contract is between the landlord and the local authority(?), so the rent is guaranteed and is reduced accordingly. But the rent supplement has no element of guarantee about it at all.

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It sounds badly written and misleading, but surely there's some benefit in the suggestion of putting in place agreements: govt. agrees payment (effectively guaranteed) with landlords who can supply multiple units. Govt. gains from volume discount, landlord gains by having a guaranteed payment (assuming the country doesn't go bust of course) and tenant gains by not having to get (too) involved in the transaction. Or is that all too simplistic?

Hi ang

We have a Rental Accommodation Scheme, where the state rents accommodation from owners for a fixed period - I think about 5 years. The state pays the rent to the landlord directly, maintains the property and gets the tenant.

This thread is about rent supplement which is paid to tenants. The article makes out that the state is paying subsidies to landlords. It's doing no such thing.

The paper should be encouraging owners of properties to participate in such schemes and should not be berating them for it.

Brendan