Today.

In The Irish Times.

Colin Gleeson writes about the rental sector and residential landlords.

He writes:

Pat (66) has been a residential landlord all his life, but he’d prefer if his full name wasn’t published by The Irish Times. “Do you know the opprobrium I would get if I was identified?” he asks. “The hate mail I would get?”

After falling into the sector “by accident”, Pat at one stage had about 80 tenants on his books in 20 properties around Dublin 6 and Dublin 1. “I wouldn’t house one now,” he says. “Not one.”

This, he argues, is due to “appalling treatment” by the Government, and what he calls the “Tesco-isation” of the sector.

“What I mean by that is, the small guy who was providing accommodation was put out of business while the bigger players came in.

“These big American companies are coming in and they have no problem with compliance and all the registration and so forth. It’s easy for them because they have the scale, but, for the small guy, it’s murderous.

“Pretty soon, the only people letting properties will be the big huge companies. When tenants have a problem, they’ll ring up a number to say the toilet’s blocked, and they’ll get an answering machine somewhere in the United States.”

…The story of the housing and rental crisis has largely been told through the prism of the house buyer and the tenant, but Pat can barely contain his anger at what he perceives to be a stacked deck, and vitriol towards landlords among the public.

‘Tesco-isation’ of home rental sector driving landlords out (Colin Gleeson, The Irish Times)

Mark Stedman/Rollingnews