Private landlords leaving the market is the number one reason for homelessness

Topgear on Dave wrote: »

When I and most of my friends rented all the rooms in the house would be filled. So 4+ occupants in each house.

But most folks coupled up and bought so the owner occupied houses will generally have only one or two occupants.

Deleted User wrote: »

And that this is leading to homelessness. My question is how he comes to this conclusion. The property is still there. Renters buy. Their rental becomes available to another renter or buyer. Don’t see how this is leading to homelessness.

I shall try to kill two birds with a stone here:
1) Occupancy rates in rental properties seem to be higher than in owner occupied ones, however I have not found any study confirming this thesis, which is definitely something this lazy Irish govvie should urgently investigate before issuing all these crazy regulations.
2) What is rather certain is that currently low income WORKING families do not have the financial means to purchase property in the urban areas in Ireland, so by destroying the private rental market as the Irish govvie has been doing (in part intentionally and in part unintentionally with cheap vote grabbing regulations in all sorts of areas from taxation, to planning, to red tape, ...) since 2004 (I am including the RTA) and not wanting to spend on social housing, the govvie is actually screwing big (while claiming they are protecting) this class of people who can only rent. This class of people are at strong risk of homelessness and should be protected by the state.

The opposition parties which are effectively "hard left": PBP, SF, most "independents", ... are even worse in their proposals of more rapid destruction of the PRS and believing they can increase taxes (when the only low tax in Ireland is corporation tax on which the whole Irish economic growth is based) to fund the massive bill (very expensive with current building standards) of social housing. This is not the 70s; 3bed social houses are being bought for > 300k in Dublin. I have seen some dreamed up budgets for construction and land for Dublin here in this forum and the sold out media that made me laugh (not even worth replying). The Society of Chartered Surveyors provides a very good tool to destroy the BS spouted by (usually politically motivated) posters: https://www.scsi.ie/advice/renewing_your_house_insurance_rebuild_calculator
To which land and a ton of other indirect costs and fees need to be added as well and from experience the SCSI estimates are quite conservative in the current environment, so any other low figure I just consider BS from someone with a political agenda.

Whatever the Irish politicians and the sold out media spout, renters in urban areas should understand one fundamental issue: the private rental market will stay like this in the medium term (a few years) or maybe permanently like NY, San Francisco or London where a combination of nimbyism and left wing overregulation (masqueraded by good "intentions" like in Ireland) makes investing in property very expensive, this can only change with a serious economic crisis hitting demand. With the current Irish populist political framework, on the rental supply side there is no solution for "homelessness". The same "homelessness" term should be better defined, since people who never worked a day in their life and who do not want to move out of Dublin should not be classified homeless in my opinion. I call this kind of people "entitled beggars", I do not care if they have a "support network" in Dublin to "help" them in their already lazy lives, I moved all over the world without support network, worked hard and I thrived! I cannot stand the drunkards walking around Dublin at 11am (and they are visible everywhere) in a city where the unemployment level must be one of the lowest in the world. I also cannot stand the obviously unemployed mothers walking around with their children at 11am, when the children should be at school. They form a good chunk of the cohort of people at most risk of what the lefty do-gooders call "homelessness" by having taken a series of very bad and lazy life choices. This class of people should not be protected by the state in my opinion unless they accept to move out of urban areas to cheaper places in Ireland (plenty of them, in the UK they have implemented this policy and reduced the burden to the taxpayer by moving this kind of people out of London). I do not care about the do-gooders (there are a few in this forum) arguments about this class of people, this class of "homeless" people do real damage to the economic and social framework of Ireland and should not be supported as much by the taxpayers.

Finally I recently had the experience of selling a few properties in central Dublin and making a direct comparison of the sale market vs the rental market and my conclusion is: "there is no crisis for buyers in the sale market in central Dublin", buyers take their time (almost 70% are not actually buyers, but timewasters with not even finance in place) and are not that many, prices have stabilized and slightly lower than 2018 (and I am talking about the range from 180k to almost 1M), while on the rental market the renters crisis is still in full swing (just put the ad out and in 2-3 days it is rented out to top notch tenants). The rental ads receive an order of magnitude of requests more than the sale ads and timewasters are easily discarded even before viewing time. In a time span of 3 days a rental ad for a property will receive 70 to 80 requests for viewing while the same property priced to sell in a sale ad will receive maybe 7 to 8 requests in the first week (novelty factor) and then 1 or 2 per week afterwards! On the other side, the ability to negotiate most of the conditions of the sale with the buyers was refreshing (after enduring years of overregulation on the rental market): price, delivery date, content, ... All stuff that cannot be negotiated anymore in the rental market due to the populist/socialist policies of current rental regulations that have destroyed any freedom of contract between adults!



I apologize if I went out of topic with my post.

Edited. Too much info

I will never rent it out again. It will either stay short term or it will be sold. At the moment there is a lot of money tied up in it but the sort term is very lucrative so is worth doing for now.

This is just to point out how I thought I was on the pigs back, but I was carrying far too much risk and tax for the amount sunk into it.
I would advise all landlords to go to a financial advisor and go through everything because you may not see the wood for the trees yourself.
Get it done out in cold hard facts and figures.
One thing is for sure it is just progressively getting worse for landlords.

beauf wrote: »

What's to stop people renting (or buying) a much bigger place than they need, or what they expect they might need.

He is right. Noone rents bigger than they need.
But in general people buy bigger than they need.

4ensic15 wrote: »

There is nothing to stop them, but as Karl Deeter points out, hardly anyone does.

And with more people renting over buying and that trend set to continue, we have little need for anymore 4 bed houses. Do we have enough already?