A Dublin 4 landlord has been ordered to pay her former tenant €3,500 in damages after failing to address the behaviour of a neighbouring “party house”.
A Residential Tenancies Board (RTB) tribunal said landlord Anna Walker made “no effort whatsoever” to safeguard tenant Tamas Illes’s peaceful occupation of the apartment in Finsbury House on Pembroke Road in Dublin 4.
The tribunal heard that Ms Walker’s family owned the building, comprising 30 apartments, including one inhabited by “boisterous” tenants directly below Mr Illes.
Mr Illes claimed the tenants would return home at midnight and “partied until early morning”.
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Mr Illes recalled one occasion in which the tenants hosted a party of 29 people on the roof of the building, during which he rang gardaí who subsequently dispersed the crowd.
Describing the apartment below him as an “open house”, he said people seemed to be coming and going “at all times of the night and early morning”, according to the tribunal report published this week.
The issue lasted from November 2021 until he vacated the apartment in July 2023.
Despite Mr Illes contacting the landlord’s property management company, Aramark, which informed him that Ms Walker was made aware of the issue, “nothing was ever done,” he said, and eventually he “gave up”.
Noting that the noise, which had a “dreadful effect” on Mr Illes and his family, was a key factor in his decision to leave the property, the tribunal said it was not a case of one night of loud music, but “persistent behaviour caused by opposing lifestyles”.
The tribunal found that an apartment in Finsbury House “is not a suitable rental property for boisterous occupants who must have regularly disturbed other occupants of the building aside from the tenant”, it said.
Speaking as his wife’s witness, Joe Walker provided an engineer’s report for the building, which he claimed showed the apartments were “98 per cent soundproof”.
He further claimed only one other apartment, which was on the same level as Mr Illes’s, complained about the noise, adding that these tenants also left the building but “for entirely different reasons”.
Separately, Ms Walker was ordered to pay a further €1,500 in damages after the tribunal found her to be in breach of her obligations concerning the standard and maintenance of the apartment.
The tribunal heard of a number of issues including inadequate heating with internal temperatures reaching highs of 16 degrees during the colder months, despite Mr Illes claiming he was spending up to €900 per month on energy bills.
Mr Illes also complained that a bedroom window had been leaking since his family moved in in 2014, claiming it was “very bad in heavy rain”, resulting in mould. It went unaddressed until the window was replaced seven years later.
Separately, Ms Walker was ordered to pay a further €400 in damages for unlawfully retaining Mr Illes’s deposit of €1,600 for 17 months.
Ms Walker retained the deposit claiming she had incurred €1,842.90 in costs as a result of removing “unauthorised electrics” from the bathroom, alongside paying for professional cleaning of the apartment and the carpet and replacing a sofa.
The tribunal accepted Mr Illes’s evidence that the apartment was cleaned to a high standard before returning the keys, and that the electrical items had been installed by the time his tenancy began “and had nothing to do with him”.
In directing Ms Walker to return the deposit and pay damages, the tribunal said her representative, Tara Wheeler of Aramark, and her witness, Mr Walker, provided “wholly inadequate” proof that she was entitled to retain any part of the €1,600 deposit.
