"43,000 landlords exiting the market..." but how many are buying in?

T McGibney said:
They literally don't. Ask any enumerator.
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Here is the CSO quality report. Ultimate non-response is about 1%


Who should I believe - some guy on the internet with anecdotes or a national statistical institute?
 
Hi Brendan, I think the RTB would state that this is their best estimate of the number of registrations, I think the adjustment for 2021 is to make it comparable to previous years (they have a document on their data website, basically part 4 tenancies moved from 4 years to 6 years and a number of letters that would have been sent out in previous years, requesting info on whether a tenancy was terminated or not, weren't sent out, meaning less dead tenancies would have been cleaned out of the DB than normal).

Of course things got even more complicated in 2022......................

Edit:
  • 2022 rental tax credit requiring RTB registration number, would presumably show a bump of existing tenancies getting registered, so the change in tenancies would be zero but registrations up
  • 2022 annual registration requirement for RTB would presumably kill off dead tenancies in the DB on the anniversary of the start of the tenancy, so a reduction in registration number when the reduction in actual tenancies would be zero.
  • Eviction ban would have presumably held up the registration numbers, but that's an issue around interpreting rather than calculating the figures.
 
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NoRegretsCoyote said:
Who should I believe - some guy on the internet with anecdotes or a national statistical institute?
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It's a good question. A friend of mine was an enumerator in Dublin 4 where there are loads of apartments. He was very diligent. He even went to Google to ask them could he meet the people who were working for them but living in apartments nearby. Another guy threatened him and told him all the apartments where empty, when they were clearly being let out via airbnb. He could hear people in them, but they went quiet when he knocked.

If I recall correctly, there was very little in it for him to pursue these. So most enumerators would have just marked them down as vacant.

Maybe the CSO has allowed for this.

Brendan
 
RonnieShinbal88 said:
  • 2022 annual registration requirement for RTB would presumably kill off dead tenancies in the DB on the anniversary of the start of the tenancy, so a reduction in registration number when the reduction in actual tenancies would be zero.
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In terms of RTB registration for 2022, I wonder about the effect in terms of registration numbers of technical issues with their website (a fact that they recognised Customer service update in December 2022)
 
Here is the adjustment methodology for 2021:

https://www.askaboutmoney.com/file:///C%3A/Users/rich/Downloads/Estimated_Number_of_Private_Tenancies_at_the_end_of_2021_Final-1.pdf (Estimated Number of Private Tenancies at the end of 2021)

There are so many changes to regulations and reporting over the recent years that I don't think you can control for them all, but a method like above seems reasonable for that year.

I would take changes in their figures 2016-2021 in Figure 5 seriously, I think 2022 will be more problematic to estimate with multiple controls.
 
I think the RTB figures to 2021 are unreliable. If a tenant left, the old registration often remained in place and the re-let was added. Also, landlords selling etc. did not take down old registrations. The RTB itself, at its most recent Dail Committee appearance, stated that these were problems. I think this masked the true scale of the exodus of landlords. The new annual registration system revealed the full extent of what was happening as obsolete registrations were cancelled. It also explains the recent change in tune from the governmment and the NGOs - the landlords exodus is now accepted as a fact and a problem.
 
Brendan Burgess said:
It's a good question. A friend of mine was an enumerator in Dublin 4 where there are loads of apartments.
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This is anecdote! I don't doubt your friend's experience but the vast, vast majority of housing in Ireland is not apartments occupied by short-term lets.

Non-response bias is inevitable in any survey or census approach and the CSO has techniques to adjust for it.

So does it mean Census estimates of occupancy for apartments are less reliable than for houses? Yes. Does it mean they are "garbage"? No.
 
Hi Coyote

But is the very high figure for vacant housing units reliable?

I thought that the CSO figure was challenged by one of the Dublin councils.

Brendan
 
To add more confusion I believe that from 2016 AHB's were required to register their tenancies with the RTB so this might also have masked private landlords leaving the market since 2016!
 
Brendan Burgess said:
But is the very high figure for vacant housing units reliable?
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It's about 8% nationally and as low as 4% in some urban areas. It was 12% in 2011 nationally.

It's likely the true number is lower, the question is whether the difference is material.

In any case the same techniques are used every five years so if there is a bias it should be of a similar magnitude from census to census.
 
I believe that many of the households who do not fill in the census forms (answer the door) are non nationals.

I have also experienced issues when staying in a hotel on census night. They are supposed to give a special 1 person form to each guest, but the hotel only got 1 per room. We were a family of 5 is a suite.
 
Yes that is our experience too. We split our time between homes. If you are not there when they call the first time there is no return visit.
 
If landlords are flooding out of the market, they have three options.
1. Sell to another landlord
2. Sell to an owner occupier.
3. Leave the property empty.

Apart from 3 , which would seem unlikely, for most investors, how does landlords selling up, reduce the housing stock,

In category 1, the property stays in the rental market,
In category 2, the owner occupier, was, most likely, renting from the private market, so their rental becomes available.

So, what’s the big crisis?

In fact, the more sellers, the more affordable the housing cost becomes, for everyone.
 
Allpartied said:
If landlords are flooding out of the market, they have three options.
1. Sell to another landlord
2. Sell to an owner occupier.
3. Leave the property empty.
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There's also option 4, having the property occupied by a family member. Or, shall we call it option 3.5 perhaps, leaving it vacant in anticipation of a forthcoming option 4. Can happen where a property was bought with a view to children going to third level. Or similarly where a property owner is temporarily overseas for a work assignment. In such cases, the law discourages such properties from being available on a medium term rental market. Maybe society thinks this is a price worth paying, but it's certainly happening.
Er, not really. Owner occupiers, in their early years at least, will tend to occupy their property as a couple or even a singleton, and there will tend to be a spare bedroom or two. Whereas the same property, on the rental market, will tend to have every bedroom stuffed full to share the rent. Most owner occupiers don't do this.

Allpartied said:
So, what’s the big crisis?

In fact, the more sellers, the more affordable the housing cost becomes, for everyone.
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Loads of sellers right now. Little sign of housing cost becoming more affordable. The opposite, in fact, for new homeowners as interest rates rise.
 
Hi Allpartied

Correct.

But the distribution matters.

If landlords are selling up and other landlords are not buying, then the houses available to rent will reduce. So we have the situation where departing tenants have no other properties to rent.

If landlords are selling up and the state buys the house from the landlord and keeps the tenant in situ, you end up with the state spending money, and not one extra family is housed.

Brendan
 

Because there are not enough accomodation to buy or to rent as the population has increased with little building for a decade.

Because the new house buyer might have been living with family, co sharing instead of living alone or in couple or even living abroad.

Because you will always have a portion of the population that can't buy or don't want to buy. So rented accommodation is needed for the society to function properly.
I rented for 9 years of my life and now I am a homeowner. I didn't not buy during nine years just because I couldn't afford it. I didn't buy because it was not on the card. I didn't want to buy. I was a student, I started working, I moved country. I started in a couple.
The less property are available to rent, the more difficult it becomes to have this different steps in your life. (going to university, moving job, saving for a deposit, basically growing up). No one (or very few) starting in life can buy directly when they get their first job.

So all these people that are not in a position to buy (even at a more affordable rate), where are they supposed to live?

Have you tried recently to rent somewhere, to look at rental websites... People are knocking at doors around properties that are for rent to see if they can have a viewing. This was not the case 8, 5 or 3 years ago.
 
Brendan Burgess said:
If landlords are selling up and the state buys the house from the landlord and keeps the tenant in situ, you end up with the state spending money, and not one extra family is housed.
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This is because the state is starting from a negative number of families housed (borrowed housing?), because it relied on short term private rentals for a long term housing problem through HAP. It's a classic liability matching problem. The private landlords are not rolling over the housing debt.

Edit: I guess there are two solutions to stay at the staus quo numbers, buy them out or convince them to stay in, getting a yield for lending property to the state. From your answer I guess you don't see the point in buying them out, because it doesn't help the overall non-HAP housing market.
 
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