CityLiving: Tenant power 'leaves landlords sitting ducks' they tell Edel Morgan

How times change. Once upon a time to become a tenant you had to be prepared to prostrate yourself before a landlord and beg (or bribe) them to take you in. Once in, a good tip for survival was to immediately lower, or better still, drop your standards. Unless your landlord was of the progressive variety, any hifalutin notion of asking the landlord to "upgrade" the property could see you swiftly and unceremoniously downgraded to a cardboard box.

Now the situation has reversed to the extent that the landlords of Ireland are having to look at ways to protect themselves against what they describe in a press release as "ever increasing tenants' rights". And who is allowing these power-mad tenants run amok? The Private Residential Tenancies Board (PRTB) which is currently wading through the 70,000 registrations of tenancies they have received.

With tenants being so transient these days, by the time the registrations are processed, in many cases the tenants have moved on and the landlord has to go about registering the new ones. The Irish Property Owners Association (IPOA) says it is considering mounting a legal challenge against what it calls the "unworkable bureaucracy" of the PRTB, which it contends has had to return around 20 per cent of registration forms which were incomplete - mostly due to tenants giving either an incorrect or no PPS numbers.

The eight-month delay in dealing with registrations has not only left IPOA members "in severe difficulty" with frequently changing tenants but with non-payment of rents and anti-social behaviour. "The property owner cannot get any redress regardless of his most diligent efforts to comply with the legislation," says the release. It's about time legislators listened "to the people who supply private rented accommodation and implement a workable system as was recommended by the Commission of the Private Rented Sector".

With an increased supply of rental accommodation on the market since the Government re-introduced mortgage interest relief, young professionals are in a position to be choosy about where they live. The "power" they have acquired is effectively bargaining clout. Landlords can no longer call the shots if they want to hold on to a tenant. They have to continually upgrade their property and keep rents at a reasonable level.

IPOA spokesman Fintan McNamara is quick to point out it's not that landlords want to deprive tenants of their rights, but that "some tenants are abusing their increased rights", leaving landlords as "sitting ducks".

He says that even if the board arbitrates a dispute between a landlord and a tenant who isn't paying rent, that tenant could "manufacture" reasons why the rent was withheld so the board will find in their favour.

Landlords should not have to register tenants so frequently, he believes, and Ireland should follow the UK example where it is proposed to register once every every five years for a flat fee of £150.

Members are having to resort to "alternative agreement structures", says McNamara, "so they have some protection against tenants rights". By "alternative agreement structures" he is referring to short term licencing agreements where the tenant does not have exclusive occupancy of the property or business lettings where a tenant works from home and is arguably exempt from registration.

City Living attempted to contact the PRTB for a comment, to no avail. The main number was constantly engaged, an email went unanswered and the Department of Environment and Local Government press office said they could not get through either.

This is only one in a long list of grievances of the IPOA. In another press release fired off by their new PR people this week they claim that the rental market is "collapsing" and many investors are at their wits end. Apparently, they are selling up in their droves due to poor rental returns, over regulation of the market, an unfair tax regime, stamp duty at 9 per cent, VAT at 13.5 per cent and capital gains at 20 per cent.

"Managing properties is time consuming, frustrating and costly and, with the recent registration changes and waste management charges, many property owners have had enough."

"The Government is ripping off the property owner and the tenants are having to move out of affordable accommodation that is being converted from multiple units to private accommodation, and have to rent in costly apartment blocks instead."

While it is true that there is less budget ac accommodation available for lower income tenants, the DAFT.ie quarterly report flatly contradicts the IPOA's claims of a collapsing rental market. "Previous gloomy predictions for the Irish rental market were misplaced," it says , reporting a "very orderly adjustment of rents to a quite dramatic increase in supply." It also claims that properties are letting more quickly, fuelled by inward migration.

So it the DAFT report is to be believed, it looks as if way the rental catastrophe being experienced by IPOA members has yet to affect everyone else.