Fewer than 300 homes were advertised to rent in Dublin at the start of August on Daft.ie compared with an average of 1,450 from 2015 to 2019, highlighting the Irish rental supply crisis.

TCD academic Ronan Lyons said the number of homes available to rent elsewhere in Ireland has also collapsed.

Outside Dublin, typically August in the late 2010s saw almost 2,100 homes available to rent compared with 420 earlier this month.

Lyons calculates that for every 100 homes available to rent 13 years ago, there are just three on the market today.

However, Daft acknowledges that multi-unit rentals, i.e. a development owned by one organisation that contains multiple rental homes, do not show up in the individual listings on the Daft website.

In Association with

Lyons noted that c.1,000 new tenancies have been added in net terms to 75 multi-unit developments tracked over the last nine months.

“This translates into roughly 25 per week. To put this number into context, the Dublin area needs at least 1,000 rental homes per week to ‘break even’, based on trends over the last decade,” said Lyons.

“This year so far, excluding MURs, it has been getting less than one third of that. Including new rental homes that were added over the last year only reduces the estimated shortfall from something like 675 rental homes per week in Dublin to perhaps 650.

“And it has no effect whatsoever on the shortfall elsewhere in the country, where new MURs have yet to make an appearance.”

The pipeline of proposed rental homes has grown, according to Cortland Consult, from 91,250 to 115,000 nationwide over the past year.

This increase is due to an increase in the stock of rental homes awaiting a decision (from 7,000 to 35,000) and the number of homes under construction (from 9,200 to 22,600).

The number at pre-planning stage has more than halved in the same period, from 31,5000 to 14,000.

Roughly 43,000 rental homes have been granted permission but construction has not yet started - a figure largely unchanged from last year.

“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,” Lyons commented.

Rents trends

Rents in the second quarter of 2022 were, on average across the country, 12.6% higher than a year previously - the strongest year-on-year increase in market rents since the Daft Report was launched in 2005.

The smallest increase (7.3% year-on-year) is seen in Dublin 20, while the largest increase (21.3%) was in Leitrim.

For the first time since 2016, year-on-year percentage increases in rents were larger in Dublin than elsewhere (12.7% vs 12.5%).

Between March and June, the average listed rent nationwide rose by 3.3%, the largest quarterly increase in five years and one of the largest on record, according to Daft.

According to Lyons: “Rents in the capital rose by 12.7% in the year to June, slightly above the average for the country outside Dublin (12.5%) - the first time since mid-2018 that this has been the case.”

Across 75 multi-unit rental developments that were active and for which reliable figures are available, there an estimated 7,490 active leases, up from 7,000 on May 1 and 6,500 last November.

Based on estimated capacity in all 75 MUR developments monitored, the occupancy rate implied by the active leases was 94.5%, as of August 1, in line with the rate observed in recent months.