Leasing to council

I leased a house for 8 years to DCC via the RAS system.

It is sold as a win/win for the landlord but my experience was far from it. The tenant absolutely wrecked the house (caused about €30k worth of damage). Despite advising the council of the damage being caused they did not want to know. There is no recourse for such damage to the property. Eventually I had to go to the PTRB to get the tenant evicted. The process took quite a bit of time to enact as I still had to give the relevant notice etc and then had to start the expensive repairs in order to sell up.

Overall I would not recommend but that is just my experience, others have many positive stories to tell.

In the building I live 2 apartments were leased to DCC...Both sets had to be evicted after countless complaints of anti-social behavior with damage done to both the common areas and apartments and as said above no recourse to get repairs from council. Both landlords lived in the west and thought it would be an easy option. It seemed endless stress for them.

If it is a rural house then absolutely do not do it. What happens is that they council assign to more rural houses tenants who have a terrible track record of complaints and antisocial bahaviour and can't be accomodated in built up areas due to the hassle they cause. You end up with the worst being sent out to rural houses so that they can piss off the least number of people.

My sister did it for a while some years back. Ended up with travellers in the house and they eventually disappeared leaving a load of scrap cars and rubbish all over the place.

There was a thread on here of a similar nightmare a landlord had with their council with one of the long term schemes. In fact the council admitted that they had told the tenant to overhold and it had to go legal.

Take the overwhelming advice and avoid like the plague.