One of the inevitable things about renting is that one day you realise that you do not control the pace of rent rises and it is your landlord that does and it's not nice when that moment arrives, slaps you in the face and reduces you to tears.
Renters’ woes: ‘I feel betrayed. I’ve taken care of their home like it was mine’ Scot Bucholz’s landlord contacted him this week to say the rent was going up
When Scot Bucholz moved to Ireland from Colorado in 2014 he was surprised to be asked to pay a month’s rent on top of a deposit for his apartment on Cork Street in Dublin 8. However, after three months searching for a property that would accept his dog, he was also relieved to finally have accommodation in his new home city. He was surprised when, last year, his landlord got in touch to say he was raising the rent by 11.5 per cent. Bucholz had spent the previous 24 months dealing with over priced heating bills, water leaking through the windows, broken blinds and unfinished repairs on the property and was fed up calling his landlord for answers. A price hike in the rental agreement was not what he expected.
“It was €1,300 a month when I moved in and they wanted to raise it €1,425. I had worked in property management in the US where the normal increase on property is 3-5 per cent annually. I told him the Government had said rents could only be increased by four per cent and paid him that.” Bucholz, who recently completed his studies in journalism at Griffith College, says his landlord justified the rent hike as necessary for the mortgage repayments on his family’s home in Mayo. “I told him it’s not my responsibility to fund the lifestyle you’ve created and cannot afford.” Student accommodation crisis: our school-leavers deserve better
The landlord did not raise the possibility of another price hike until earlier this week when, two days before he was set to travel to Austria to meet his family for a holiday, Bucholz received an email from the landlord.
“He said he was considering selling to his employer and wanted to know what my plans were. Later that night he got back to me with the offer of putting the rent up to €1,525 for the next six months. He said he still wasn’t making enough to cover his mortgage. I told him the people who live above me had been there eight years and I pay more than them even though we have the exact same style of flat layout.”
Raise prices
Bucholz says his landlord’s response was that another flat in the Cork street complex cost €1,600 to rent and that real estate agents had advised him to raise his prices. “Just because a newer flat that has new quality stuff can command that type of rent does not mean everyone can raise their rent,” Bucholz says on the phone from Austria. “If you’re not taking care of your asset and maintaining it at a certain level for habitation, you cannot get the same value for rent. I pointed out once again that I still had water coming in and part of the ceiling was not closed up. I also don’t have working smoke detectors in my building. Anywhere else that’s illegal.”
Bucholz says Dublin City Council has a responsibility to introduce rent control in the capital. “It is up to local governments to look after their residents. What the State should be doing is changing mortgage laws and allowing people to refinance their loans.
“This is truly another banking issue with landlords as the scapegoat. If banks had better mortgage laws it would give people a better opportunity to either own a home or find somewhere to rent.”
Bucholz is worried he may not have a home when he returns from his holiday in Austria.
“I feel betrayed. I’ve taken care of their home like it was mine. Just because they’ve put themselves in a financial situation, I’m now the key to solving their problems by putting me in a financial situation. This level of stress has me as a grown man in tears. “
One of the inevitable things about renting is that one day you realise that you do not control the pace of rent rises and it is your landlord that does and it's not nice when that moment arrives, slaps you in the face and reduces you to tears.
Kind of like when the banks raise interest rates - sometimes out of cycle.
Then there is the whole of history reversing here, whereby you have the yank coming to Dublin to better himself only to be abused by a greedy landlord.
Then there is the whole of history reversing here, whereby you have the yank coming to Dublin to better himself only to be abused by a greedy landlord.
Ah, a genuinely entertaining comment - I do luv a good belly laugh ... LOL
A Professional Demographer to an amateur demographer:"negative natural increase will never outweigh the positive net migration"
The great Irish housing crisis is not limited to Dublin, the housing shortage is widespread including bog towns as many hapless tenants are finding out.
Rising rents: ‘I don’t want to share a room with three others’
With a little over a month until college starts ‘many students are getting desperate now/ Kate Stapleton, a final-year student at University College Cork. She says students face an acute shortage of rental accommodation. Rooms that are available are at sky-high prices or of poor quality.
There was no photo on the website. When I got there, the four-bed house needed a good going over with a hoover and a couple of litres of Dettol . The bins could also have done with being changed a week earlier given the stench. How much? €2,000 a month. This wasn’t London, Manhattan or Singapore. This was Wilton in Cork. These days, paying out €500 a month for a double-room on the outskirts of Cork City isn’t out of the ordinary. But the standard of this property on offer didn’t come anywhere close to qualifying for the price. This is the reality facing thousands of students like me as the scramble for accommodation heats up ahead of the new academic year. The acute shortage of supply, sky-high prices and poor quality isn’t limited to students attending Trinity, UCD or DCU. It’s an issue for students attending universities right across the country. Viewings can be strange and sometimes unsettling. One of the most surprising was a house where the entire viewing was conducted as Gaeilge. Rising rents: ‘The search has been shocking, daunting and stressful’ Renters’ woes: ‘I feel betrayed. I’ve taken care of their home like it was mine’ ‘I’ve been looking for a house with my children since May and I’m really anxious now’ Personally, I have no problem using the cúlpa focail, but afterwards I was asked if this was done to check where I was from. I certainly hope not. But given the landlord clarified at the end of the viewing that he wouldn’t be taking “anyone who was from the city centre”, I simply don’t know. My search began last March, when a friend and I decided to link up and look for somewhere to live for our last year of studying in UCC. We joked about the fact that we were the ideal tenants as two final-year girls with glowing references, steady part-time jobs and reasonable budgets. Naively, we expected to have little issue finding accommodation for the upcoming year. We certainly didn’t think that come August, with little over a month to go, all our communication would be through the medium of sending each other links to ads on daft.ie, rent.ie, UCC’s accommodation website and tagging each other in Facebook posts about free rooms.
It’s a shock having come from Edinburgh, where I went for a placement as part of my course last semester. The letting agency over there took no issue with a short tenancy. It only took about two weeks between emailing about the ad and getting the lease. They weren’t bothered about our student status, and the location and rent were almost too good to be true. Just over €1,600 will get you a spacious apartment between four people, within walking distance to town and with a formal rental agreement that acknowledges both your rights and responsibilities as a tenant. Many students are getting desperate now as college draws near. Luckily, I’ve just found somewhere for next year (through Twitter, no less), and I’ve always had cousins I can call on for somewhere to crash for the first few weeks. It’s close to college and within budget. I’m one of the lucky ones. There are countless students who won’t be as lucky as me: ones who will be crashing on couches for the semester, some who will commute for hours to and from lectures every day, more again who will have to defer a year either due to lack of somewhere to live. I’m a firm believer that students need to learn how to get to grips with grown up life, how to deal with problems living away from home, how to liaise with landlords and take on responsibility for themselves. But, in return, I think we should be able to promise our young people that they can live in reasonable, clean housing, where you don’t have to share a bedroom with three others and there aren’t 10 people fighting for a slot in the broken shower.
Is that too much for the next generation to ask for?
Rents in Dublin have ballooned by 37pc since 2012, report shows
Rental figures all over the country are rising in what is described as a ‘volatile’ market.
Any Irish person can tell you anecdotally that the rental market in the country at present is perilous, with Ireland firmly in the grip of a massive housing crisis. New figures from the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB) reveal just how stark Ireland’s accommodation problem really is.
The board maintains the national register of private residential tenancies as well as tenancies of approved housing bodies. It also provides avenues for tenants and landlords to resolve disputes and issues.
2016 – The busiest year on record for the RTB The RTB reported that 2016 was its busiest year since its establishment in 2004, with more than 130,000 calls dealt with in its call centre – a 10pc increase from 2015 – as well as more than 50,000 email queries registered.
Tenants staying in rented accommodation for longer spells of time is a growing trend, with Ireland’s rental sector now comparable to many of its European counterparts. With this pattern emerges the urgent need to address the current rental market.
“This means we have to adjust and transition to a rental sector that is no longer geared towards renting as a temporary solution prior to home ownership, but a rental sector that can support short- and long-term renting,” read the report.
Considerable changes have been made since the 2015 report was issued, including the implementation of Rent Pressure Zone (RPZ) coverage and other rent certainty measures. These changes have played their part in the rapid increase of 160pc in dispute applications about rent reviews since they were introduced.
Dublin rents well above national average Rental prices countrywide have shot up, with Dublin increasing by 37pc since 2012 to the monthly rate of €1382, while the national average rent increased by €70 to €954 per calendar month.
The largest number of disputes between tenants and landlords revolved around deposit retention, rent arrears, overholding and invalid notice of termination by landlords.
Rosalind Carroll, director of the RTB, said: “2016 saw the introduction of Rent Pressure Zone areas, which now cover 55pc of all tenancies. In these areas, rents cannot increase by more than 4pc and our focus is to create an understanding of what is a very complex legislative framework.”
The introduction of Rent Pressure Zones coincides with the spike in calls and emails received by the RTB.
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