High rents may once have been considered a predominantly Dublin problem, but earlier this week new figures released by Daft.ie stated that average rents across the State have now surpassed €2,000 a month and are climbing faster than at any stage in the past 20 years.
So what do rapidly rising rents mean for people who are renting, or trying to rent, outside the capital? How is it affecting their lives? We spoke to a number of people, living in various locations, to find out.
Sophie Brady lives in Meath. She works as a special needs assistant (SNA) and her partner is a painter. She initially moved abroad a few years ago, when her landlord decided to sell the house she was living in, but moved back home a few months later. This was in April 2023 and she’s been living with her boyfriend in his parents’ house ever since.
“I’ve been on Daft multiple times a day, every day since. We’ve had maybe two viewings out of the thousands that I’ve applied for and no one else even replies to a message or an email,” she says.
“I think people are just inundated when they list a property, that it just goes up and it’s down again the next day. So you never even hear about a viewing,” she says. “We just can‘t get anything.”
“I’m an SNA. I’m part-time because there is no full-time position for me in the school … our budget, stretched completely thin, would have been about €1,200 or €1,300 a month and there isn’t even anything advertised or listed for that. You’re looking at €1,900, minimum.”
Brady says having to live with her boyfriend’s family “puts a strain on us [and] puts a strain on them. This is putting our lives on hold essentially. We’re in our late 20s … we would potentially be engaged by now. We’d be starting a family if we had our own place. Genuinely we’re probably about 10 years off a mortgage, if even that. We don’t have people in our lives we can buy land off.”
The couple have one car. “My partner works in Trim and I work the opposite direction in Kells. I have to drop him at 6am to his job, come back home, get myself ready and then head to Kells. And then when I come home from school in the evening I have to go to Trim to collect him. The mileage we’re putting on the car because we’re slap bang in the middle.”
“Ninety-nine per cent of the people that were my friends in school are either in Australia or America right now. And I don’t want to do that. I want my kids to have Irish passports. I wanted them to be Irish citizens but we’re being really left with no option,” she says.
When Brady heard about the rising rent price figures released this week she says she felt “completely let down”, adding: “There’s no hope. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do.”
“If I hadn’t got Conor [Brady’s partner] and his family … I would have either ended up seeking Rape Crisis Centre help ... or I would have become homeless. And it’s as simple as that. People look at homeless people on the street and think, ‘Ah, drugs and alcohol. Sure they got there themselves.’ It’s really easy to become homeless in Ireland right now.”
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Brady’s reference to the Rape Crisis Centre relates to the fact that last month she spoke publicly to push for an increased sentence for her cousin, David Hamilton, who pleaded guilty to abusing her and an older relative. He was sentenced to serve seven-and-a-half years, with the final 12 months suspended.
Niamh McEvoy is a mother of six children. Two of her daughters are students in the University of Limerick.
When her daughters first started at college they had on-campus accommodation, which she says cost €550 per month for her first daughter, increasing a year later to €575 for her second daughter. “But that included all their bills which was manageable,” she says.
“We don’t get on-campus [accommodation] any more; we’re never lucky enough in the lottery,” she says.
McEvoy has noticed significant differences in cost and standards in private rentals in Limerick. Last year, she explains, her daughter was living in what McEvoy says was “substandard” accommodation. “She came home and we were looking at her clothes [which] were mouldy. She was crying, then, one evening on the phone … because she plays camogie and the inside of her helmet had mould spores.”
Now, one daughter shares a house with six other people, paying €666 per month rent, with bills on top of this. This daughter had been working part-time to try to help out with the cost, but her SUSI grant was cut by almost two-thirds because she was earning €100 a week, McEvoy says.
McEvoy’s other daughter shares a double room in a house with a friend. “[The landlord] is getting €900 for one room,” she says.
McEvoy is feeling the financial pressure of these costs. “We’re kind of looking at, do we go in and ask the bank can they rearrange our mortgage repayments for a few months every year for us? Just to give us some breathing space.”
Kevin Coleman works in finance and will be 33 this year. He lived at home with his parents in Tipperary until last year, he says, but now lives in Cork with his girlfriend.
It was important for him to get his own place “mostly for my own sanity and mental health”, he says. “I was working from home in my own bedroom. My bedroom was my office, my sleeping area, where I watched TV, where I entertained myself, so it got to a point where ‘I have to get out of here’.”
He lives in a city-centre, two-bedroom apartment. “The rent we’re paying would now be regarded as quite reasonable, even though it’s not reasonable at all,” he says. “We’re paying €1,650 which doesn’t include bills.”
“I block my eyes and hit send every month,” he says of paying a high rent. “The inability to be able to get a mortgage, to be able to pay for a house, that’s the crux of everything, at least for us. Every so often you browse the housing, the mortgage environment and it seems so far away from us.”
Coleman would love to live “rurally, with a garden ... which would afford us that extra space if we did want to start a family. At the moment it’s very restricting. There’s no way you could bring a baby into this environment. In the middle of the city centre.”
Coleman says some of his friends are building on their parents’ properties, “because they’re able to scrape enough mortgage together to be able to build a house [and] they don’t have to purchase the land.”
Saving is not an option. It’s next to impossible to do on a wage and paying this amount of rent
— Gwen
He tries to keep things in perspective and says walking around Cork city centre and seeing homeless people is very “grounding”. “I think, thank God, I might be paying extortionate rents but I’m able to do so for now. But owning a house, getting into a position where we can move on to the next stage of our lives just feels so alien for now.”
When it comes to attitudes to renting in the longer term, Coleman says attitudes have changed through necessity. “I think more and more people are seeing it as, ‘This is my life now. This is what I’m going to pay. I’m never going to own a house. I’m never going to be in a position where I’m paying a mortgage on a house that I own.’”
He adds: “This is us now. We are renters, for the medium to long term.”
Gwen* is a 35-year-old primary schoolteacher living in Wicklow. She shares a house with two of her friends. The rent on the property is €2,000.
A couple of years ago a health incident meant she had to take some time out of regular employment. “I had to take about six months off work. I went down to half pay and it meant I had to live with my parents at that time because I literally could not afford to live elsewhere,” she says.
“One of the big things I’m really struggling with now is literally saving. The concept of me owning a home is just completely by the wayside. I can’t even have it in my periphery, because saving is not an option. It’s next to impossible to do on a wage and paying this amount of rent.”
Gwen says she has a very good landlady “so I’m definitely one of the lucky ones. But [the rent she pays] is the average cost of many places.
“Nearly 10 years of my life I’ve rented and it sickens me to look back at the money I’ve paid in rent. That could have gone towards a mortgage, or a deposit, but it’s literally just dead money that’s paid for me to have a roof over my head.”
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Gwen says that she is “on the dating scene”, explaining that when she’s chatting to men and getting to know them, she’ll often discover that they too are renting with friends, or living with their parents, also unable to afford their own homes.
“I‘m lucky to live with two great girls, and not that we’d be having people over all the time, but it’s definitely an agreement with us that we’re cool with boyfriends being over … but you would imagine that a primary teacher at age 35 should be well capable of owning a home, or at least well on the way to owning a home.”
We can’t go anywhere because the price of rent is so high everywhere else, that we don’t want to say too much to our landlord to get the work done
— Helen
She finds tales of rising rents “terrifying”.
“It’s getting to the stage where I’m like, is my landlady going to turn around and jack up the rent? She’s well within her rights to do it.
“I can‘t go back to live with my parents; that’s not feasible for me. I’m mid-30s now, I don‘t want to be living with my parents, but I’ve very few options other than that and it is terrifying.”
Gwen says that long-term, even though she’s a self-confessed “homebird”, she’ll need to consider moving to a different county in search of lower rent.
Helen* has two children, one of whom is disabled. She says she’s lucky at the moment because her rent is relatively low compared to other people’s. She’s paying €800 per month, she says. Helen is a carer for her disabled child. HAP covers €80 per month of their rent, she says.
She lives in the same town as her friends and family in Donegal. It’s essential that she has her support network around her, she explains. But the housing estate she lives in is what she terms “a defective-block housing estate”.
Although they’re renting, Helen says she and her partner have always done any jobs, such as painting, that were needed in the house. Recently she says she has started seeing mould and damp which, she says, “are signs of mica”.
She says she’s afraid to push her landlord on making the necessary repairs. “He’s not doing the work for us because he’s saying, ‘Oh yeah I’m going to sell it.’ But we can’t get a mortgage, and nobody can get a mortgage for a defective block house,” she says.
“We’re kind of living in fear,” she says because another house for rent in her estate, which she says is identical to the one she lives in, “is €1,500 a month”.
“We can’t go anywhere because the price of rent is so high everywhere else, that we don’t want to say too much to our landlord to get the work done.” She says the landlord could get €1,500 in rent for the house “so he’s not going to do much”.
“We’re not eligible for a mortgage because I’m only a carer … Social housing, there’s none available in our town that is suitable for our child.
“Because of the rising rent … we’re scared to question our landlord. We can’t afford to move to any other house that’s a four-bed.”
Helen points to other costs she has encountered recently such as her car needing €900 worth of work. “You’re dealing with everyday struggles with this housing crisis still and this rental crisis.”
*Names have been changed. In conversation with Jen Hogan
Are rent increases skyrocketing or moderating?
Two contradictory data sets on the state of Ireland’s rental market were released over the past month. One told a story of skyrocketing rental prices, while the other saw rent increases moderating. But which one is accurate?
The Daft.ie quarterly rental report was released on Monday and found rents are now rising faster than at any point over the past 20 years.
[ Average monthly rent exceeds €2,000 for the first timeOpens in new window ]
On the other hand, the latest Residential Tenancies Board report found the growth in rents for both new and existing tenancies has moderated.
The Daft.ie statistics are drawn only from properties advertised on the daft.ie website, while the RTB data is taken from annual registrations which all landlords are required to provide.
It follows that the RTB data paints a broader and more accurate picture. But perhaps this misses the point, that regardless of how fast rents are rising, the fact is that they are still rising – and particularly so outside Dublin.
“Limerick’s rental market has seen an unprecedented surge over the past six months,” says Lisa Kearney, president of the Institute of Professional Auctioneers and Valuers and director of Rooney Auctioneers in Limerick.
New tenancy rents have increased rapidly in Limerick city over the past 18 months, with the average price now €1,600 per month, according to the latest RTB/ESRI Rent Index.
The Daft.ie report found the average price of lettings being advertised on its website in Limerick city in the first quarter of this year was €2,400.
There is a growing affordability crisis in the region and a chronic shortage of rental properties, Kearney says.
“Demand is far outpacing supply, resulting in intense competition and skyrocketing rents,” she says.
A number of factors are driving this crisis in the area, though Kearney says “ironically, much of it stems from Limerick’s own success”.
There are a large number of multinational employers in the city such as Verizon, Eli Lilly and Johnson & Johnson, and this has created a “boom in employment”.
“With that boom has come an influx of new residents – all in need of accommodation,” she says. “The University of Limerick and other colleges bring a continuous flow of student renters into the market, further increasing demand,” Kearney says.
Rachel Slaymaker, research officer with the ESRI, says the rental prices in Limerick city have “come a long way up in a short time”, with the price of new tenancies “rising very rapidly to the point they are now on par with the figures for Cork city”.
There is some evidence of new supply coming on to the market in Limerick, though it appears to be at a much higher price, says Slaymaker.
“We did see some new supply come into Limerick, but I think because there isn’t much supply, if you get a fairly plush set of apartments come in, that will impact the average price for these kinds of new tenancies.
“When you look at the market as a whole, you probably get a different picture, but in terms of what’s available now, those prices have definitely gone up.”
Another outlier in the data is Co Galway, which has seen eight consecutive quarters of high growth in new tenancy rent prices, according to the RTB report.
The average rent for new tenancies in Galway city in the last quarter of 2024 was €1,730, which represents a 8.4 per cent increase on the previous year. This is despite the fact that it is in a rent pressure zone (RPZ), meaning rent increases should be capped at 2 per cent per year, or the rate of inflation, whichever is lower.
“Galway city is an area that sees quite a lot of turnover in the market, partly because of the university. Whenever there’s a bit more churn, there’s a potential for more upward pressure on the average prices just because of the difference between the prices of what’s coming in and what’s coming out each time,” says Slaymaker.
She also makes the point that while Galway city has been in a RPZ since 2017, the entire county of Galway was only designated as an RPZ last September, and “you probably expect a little bit of settling-in time as people get familiar with the regulations”.
Looking at the broader picture, it is clear that “the least affordable section of the private rental sector is getting more unaffordable,” Mick Byrne, researcher at the UCD School of Social Policy, says.
There are two big forces pushing against each other in the Irish rental market, says Byrne. On one hand, the RPZs are controlling rents for existing tenants, while the shortage of supply and increase in wages is driving up the cost for new tenancies.
“You could have somebody in Dublin who’s living in a two-bedroom apartment and paying €1,200 a month for it, and you could have someone beside them, living in an identical apartment, who’s paying €2,400 a month,” says Byrne.
While we can argue the toss between rents skyrocketing and moderating, one thing is undeniable – rents are continuing to rise, particularly outside Dublin, and especially in new tenancies. - Niamh Towey
