RTB - Tenancy registration in the context of house sharing

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Timothy5

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I emailed the RTB the question below three times but I got no answer from them. Maybe someone here could give some advice.

Take a house-sharing situation where a house that has 4 bedrooms is being let. Each bedroom is let individually so that each of the 4 tenants pays their rent individually to the landlord. If one tenant leaves, it is up the landlord to find a replacement tenant, and not up to the remaining tenants. Apart from the bedrooms, all other areas of the house are communal e.g. kitchen, sitting room, bathroom. So essentially, the 4 tenants live as a single household. Does this situation constitute a single tenancy or 4 separate tenancies in the context of registering a tenancy?

In other words, does this situation require four separate registrations (each costing €40), or would a single registration suffice. (But if the latter applies, whose name of the four tenants would you use in the registration?)
 
I looked at the Residential Tenancies Act Part 7, Chapter 2 which deals with registration and it says that:

An application under this section may not relate to more than one tenancy of a dwelling; accordingly separate applications under this section are required for separate tenancies.
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So if these are four separate tenancies then you have to register them each.

I'm an ameteur in tenancy law and it could be that four separate tenancy arrangements like you describe could be construed as being effectively one tenancy as per the extract above.

Maybe @Sarenco could advice.
 
You can’t have four separate tenancies in a single house.

What you’ve described is a co-tenancy and should be registered as such. The names of all four co- tenants should be included in a single registration.
 
NoRegretsCoyote and Sarenco, thanks for replying.

@Sarenco, so, assuming that all four co-tenants are included in a single registration, what would happen if one tenant subsequently left and the landlord then found a replacement tenant? Would that mean that the old tenancy had ended and a new one had begun, with a new registration being required, which would include the new tenant plus the three remaining original tenants?
 
Timothy5 said:
Would that mean that the old tenancy had ended and a new one had begun, with a new registration being required, which would include the new tenant plus the three remaining original tenants?
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It would indeed.
 
To get a feel for what is required to register a co-tenancy, I decided to create a draft dummy registration by logging in to the RTB website and selecting ‘Create a Registration’ (which draft btw I subsequent discovered can’t be deleted:oops:).

The following is some of the more salient information that needs to be input.
  • Dwelling Type (e.g. House, apartment, etc.)
  • Number of bedrooms and number of bed spaces
  • Tenancy commencement date
  • Amount of rent paid and payment frequency
  • Number of occupants over 18
  • Number of occupants under 18
  • List of each occupant’s name, along with their PPS no., date of birth, phone no., and email address.

Some thoughts/observations for the case of a co-tenancy:
  • For the ‘Amount of rent paid’ figure, presumably it is the aggregate rent of all the co-tenants that is required.
  • Interestingly, the date that each individual co-tenant began living in the house is not required, only the tenancy commencement date.
  • As time goes on, and as some co-tenants leave and are replaced, I’m guessing that the tenancy itself is deemed to continue to exist, even if eventually none of the original co-tenants remain. So theoretically, it seems that the tenancy could go on for ever. So presumably, each time a co-tenant leaves, or a new co-tenant arrives, you would simply edit the tenancy registration (under ‘Manage Registrations’) to remove the name of a departed co-tenant or to add the name of a new co-tenant. [Edit: I just realise that this isn't Sarenco's take on it -- he indicates that the replacement of a co-tenant requires a brand-new tenancy registration.]
 
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