There are fewer properties in Ireland than ever, and the properties available are only getting more expensive.

Daft.ie just released their rental report of the second quarter of 2022, and it’s not looking pretty.

There were just 716 homes available to rent nationwide on 1 August. This is a sharp drop down from the 2,455 rental properties the same time last year. In Dublin alone, there were just 292 houses available to rent in Dublin.

This approximately one fifth of the average amount of rentals available between 2015 and 2019. It is also the lowest level of availability in August since Daft began their report in 2006.

And don’t think about getting out of Dublin. In the entirety of Connacht and Ulster, there were just 110 rental properties available at the start of August.

Rising cost of properties

And as the amount of properties available in Ireland are plummeting down, the cost of the properties available are only soaring upwards.

The average monthly rent nationwide is now 1,618 euros. This is a rise in 3.3 per cent from the last quarter, the single fastest quarterly increase in five years and one of the largest on record.

The average monthly rent in Dublin is 2,153 euros. This is the sixth consecutive rise in rent in Dublin, and a 12.7 per cent increase from last year. The city centre saw the highest quarterly increase in rent at 3.8 per cent.

Like full-property rentals, the cost of room rentals has also risen sharply, with an average increase of 13.5 per cent in the year to July 2022.

Nationwide, every region in Ireland saw a considerable increase in rent prices in the last three months. Not so shockingly, South County Dublin is the most expensive region to rent with an average monthly cost of 2,387 euros. Country Leitrim has the lowest rent at 843 euros per month, but this is coupled with the fact there are most likely three houses available to rent in all of Leitrim.

County Galway (separate from Galway City) saw the smallest increase in monthly rents with a 0.7 per cent increase in average monthly rents. The rent is still 1,184 euros, but take the small victories where you can.

New properties

Associate Professor Ronan Lyons, who runs the Daft.ie report, showed hope that these alarming figures will be a wake up call for the Government and property developers to speed up the process of building more rental properties.

“About 22,600 [properties] are under construction, with a further 43,000 having been granted permission,” Ronan said, “It is this kind of scale – tens of thousands of homes, not the few thousand that have been added in the last few years – that will be needed to address the chronic shortage of rental homes in the country.”

“So much of the housing policy debate is unfortunately based on the assumption that more professionally-run rental housing is, somehow, bad for Ireland. How bad does the rental supply crisis have to get to change minds?”

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