New data that shows an increase in the amount of private rental accommodation in the year to the end of March may not be accurate, according to the chief economist with the Bank of Ireland, Conall Mac Coille.
Mr Mac Coille said there is a very large discrepancy between the figures released on Thursday by the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB) and the figures contained in the 2022 census in relation to households in private rented accommodation.
He also said the RTB figures could be affected by the changes to how the board is maintaining the register of private landlords on which the data is based.
The new data series based on changed criteria released this week by the RTB shows that the number of registered private landlords increased by 6.5 per cent between the second quarter of last year and the first quarter of this year.
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There were 103,035 registered private landlords at the end of the period. The number of registered private tenancies increased by 7.9 per cent over the same period, to 230,006.
Mr Mac Coille said his overarching concern with the data was the discrepancy between the number of registered tenancies and census figures from 2022 that showed approximately 330,000 households in the private rented sector. “That’s 100,000 [tenancies] that have gone missing.”
Previous data released by the RTB, which can’t be compared with the latest series because a number of factors have changed, had shown a steady decrease in the number of landlords in the market since 2017.
Among the factors that have changed is a new policy of automatically deleting tenancies, and the associated landlord, from the register if they haven’t renewed the tenancy registration each year as now required.
The new data shows that 22.55 per cent of all tenancies in Dublin are associated with landlords who have more than 100 tenancies, most of whom are presumed to be corporate landlords.
Mr Mac Coille said he did not find this surprising, given that approximately 10,000 apartments had been completed in the past 12 months, most of them in Dublin.
“If anything, I thought it might have been potentially a bit higher at this point,” he said.
The economist said he believed that, on balance, landlords probably are leaving the market. “Why is another question.”
The data shows that the number of one-tenancy and two-tenancy landlords supplying private accommodation to the market supplied 38.71 per cent of the total.
A spokesperson for the RTB said its data and the census data “are two completely different data sets, collected with different purposes at different points in time.”
Sinn Féin’s housing spokesman Eoin Ó’Broin said the new data showed that single property landlords are leaving the market, but this is being offset in part by new mid-sized and large portfolio landlords.
However, Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohoe disputed the claim that small landlords were leaving the market, saying “we are seeing an early sign of even a potential increase” in the number of such landlords.
Meanwhile, Mr Donohoe has downplayed suggestions of a substantial cost-of-living package in the budget in October by emphasising the sharp drop in inflation during the course of the year.
Mr Donohoe said there would be a package as prices were still high and the Government would continue to help families address the impact of the cost of living.
However, “because inflation has come down so quickly, it will have an impact on the nature of possible new measures that we will enact come budget day,” he said.
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