Potentially a hot take – I’m inclined to agree with the article.
I lived in a shithole managed by a woeful landlord who continually broke RTB guidelines. Moved out into a development managed by a REIT and it’s a night and day difference.
Maintenance requests are worked on quickly, there’s security around at night, and the apartment is way nicer than what you would get from a traditional landlord at the same rent.
I don’t have the looming worry over my head that my landlord will turn around and show up in my place with little to no warning since they have to actually abide by the law.
I don’t rent anymore, but I actually agree. Anytime I’d rented with a private landlord, I had issues. Through a company, everything was automatic.
From studies in America, individual landlords are overall better because they’re less inclined to kick people out at short notice etc but I don’t know whether that’s better compared to what the landlords could potentially do given more limited tenant rights over there.
If you get a fund landlord chances are they’ll go by the book for the most part, however they have an interest in writing the book and rich funds can exert a lot of influence, thereby potentially reducing tenant protections in the long run.
The overall findings was a functional market needs a good mix of individual landlords and corporate ones. But individual landlords will probably represent the worst and the best of what tenants have to deal with.
Edit: I’m only saying what the studies said (i worked in something adjacent to housing briefly in the civil service and they were brought up).
But a mix of small and large landlords seems to make sense to me. Albeit I think reits shouldn’t have these insane tax exemptions and should just operate as any other company
They generally are, for a few reasons
They don’t have the ability to evict you provided you hold up on your obligations and pay rent. This makes it way easier to go to them when there is something that goes wrong, because you’ve proper security of tenure. With small landlords people feel scared to raise any problems as they know the landlord has the option of a fraudulent eviction by claiming to be selling the property or taking it back for their own use – and it’s hard for tenants to police that. Institutional landlords by definition can’t take the property for their own use or the use of a family member, and they usually can’t sell it either because of the Tyrellstown amendment.
They are looking to maximise their return. It’s in their interest that the place is kept in good order, and they just contract that work out to another crowd to do the maintenance. It’s just a load of people doing a job. With an individual landlord renting one or two places they don’t have the resources for a system like that, they’re spending their free time trying to sort out the problem and try to do as much themselves as they can because they don’t have the economies of scale for a proper maintenance contract with a company.
I don’t think anyone would really debate this lol. Would much rather deal with a company than some dodgy “mom and pop” landlord or a cowboy real estate agent working on their behalf
Absolutely matches up with my experience. Agents and institutions are professional and treat you like an adult. Individual landlords in Ireland often seem to treat people like they are a distant young relative who they are doing a favour to. Constant problems with entering the house without notice, poor communication, often wanting to be paid in cash. Its a generalisation obviously, but large companies in general are more likely to follow the law to the letter (which includes exploiting loopholes).
We are killing ourselves with this demonisation of foreign investment into housing. Do we complain about French vulture funds building our trains and extracting fares? There was a photo of Dev on the sub today, and his autarchic parochial economic vision lives on in our national subconscious.
Currently renting from a management company and it’s miles better than the cash in hand, no written lease, dodgy auld fella landlord shite I was used to.
Gahh I hate the term Vulture Funds being used for this vulture funds buy distressed debt pick it clean of any assets and then try to sell it off for profit.
Institutional property companies manage rental properties in a Professional manner. Well most of the time anyway.
Ah good to know they’ll represent and arbitrate without bias….
Downside is that reits are often very reluctant to rent to people with lower incomes or what they think are unstable jobs.
They prop up the rent to more than 2k euro for 1 bed apartment and then they demand that you have net salary where rent would be below 40% of it.
Company “A” shadow REIT, buys property, acts like a shity landlord. Tenants get annoyed.
Company “B” REIT buys same property. Fixed a few things.
Tenants are delighted.
Few months later, rents raised. But tenants think it’s worth it it because things get fixed. Also good press as the REIT are now a great bunch of lads.
Oldest trick in the book.
Housing associations are absolutely the way to go. Not this cloak and dagger shit, pull the wool over your eyes lying cunts.
This whole post and comments is obviously a bunch of shills.
Pretty low standard to beat
Interesting, in my experience renting from a big company has been horrible, one tried to stop my family visiting me cause they thought I was having a party (it was just my parents) they sent security once to another house they own to kick out family members visiting. I understand they don’t want the house wrecked by student parties but trying to stop family visiting is fucked up but also they must have had a camera or had people check the houses daily? Or maybe a neighbour was told to keep an eye out who knows.
Had another one where we rented by room, turned out one of the lads hadn’t paid rent in a while and then he suddenly moved out and disappeared, They decided to pin his bill on me saying I had missed payments…that added up to exactly 6 months rent.
I had to photocopy all my rent receipts…go down to the office and ask them what the fuck they were playing at? All red faced so they knew they fucked up, they thought they would get lucky and think I didn’t keep my receipts.
I stopped paying rent for the exact amount of my deposit about 2 months at the time. When I moved out I dropped the key and told them to get fucked. I should have done something more about the fraud but the company is long gone now and I was younger so I didn’t know what I could have done about it.
14 comments
Potentially a hot take – I’m inclined to agree with the article.
I lived in a shithole managed by a woeful landlord who continually broke RTB guidelines. Moved out into a development managed by a REIT and it’s a night and day difference.
Maintenance requests are worked on quickly, there’s security around at night, and the apartment is way nicer than what you would get from a traditional landlord at the same rent.
I don’t have the looming worry over my head that my landlord will turn around and show up in my place with little to no warning since they have to actually abide by the law.
I don’t rent anymore, but I actually agree. Anytime I’d rented with a private landlord, I had issues. Through a company, everything was automatic.
From studies in America, individual landlords are overall better because they’re less inclined to kick people out at short notice etc but I don’t know whether that’s better compared to what the landlords could potentially do given more limited tenant rights over there.
If you get a fund landlord chances are they’ll go by the book for the most part, however they have an interest in writing the book and rich funds can exert a lot of influence, thereby potentially reducing tenant protections in the long run.
The overall findings was a functional market needs a good mix of individual landlords and corporate ones. But individual landlords will probably represent the worst and the best of what tenants have to deal with.
Edit: I’m only saying what the studies said (i worked in something adjacent to housing briefly in the civil service and they were brought up).
But a mix of small and large landlords seems to make sense to me. Albeit I think reits shouldn’t have these insane tax exemptions and should just operate as any other company
They generally are, for a few reasons
They don’t have the ability to evict you provided you hold up on your obligations and pay rent. This makes it way easier to go to them when there is something that goes wrong, because you’ve proper security of tenure. With small landlords people feel scared to raise any problems as they know the landlord has the option of a fraudulent eviction by claiming to be selling the property or taking it back for their own use – and it’s hard for tenants to police that. Institutional landlords by definition can’t take the property for their own use or the use of a family member, and they usually can’t sell it either because of the Tyrellstown amendment.
They are looking to maximise their return. It’s in their interest that the place is kept in good order, and they just contract that work out to another crowd to do the maintenance. It’s just a load of people doing a job. With an individual landlord renting one or two places they don’t have the resources for a system like that, they’re spending their free time trying to sort out the problem and try to do as much themselves as they can because they don’t have the economies of scale for a proper maintenance contract with a company.
Dear Irish Examiner: vulture funds buy distressed debt, not property. Thank you.
I don’t think anyone would really debate this lol. Would much rather deal with a company than some dodgy “mom and pop” landlord or a cowboy real estate agent working on their behalf
Absolutely matches up with my experience. Agents and institutions are professional and treat you like an adult. Individual landlords in Ireland often seem to treat people like they are a distant young relative who they are doing a favour to. Constant problems with entering the house without notice, poor communication, often wanting to be paid in cash. Its a generalisation obviously, but large companies in general are more likely to follow the law to the letter (which includes exploiting loopholes).
We are killing ourselves with this demonisation of foreign investment into housing. Do we complain about French vulture funds building our trains and extracting fares? There was a photo of Dev on the sub today, and his autarchic parochial economic vision lives on in our national subconscious.
Currently renting from a management company and it’s miles better than the cash in hand, no written lease, dodgy auld fella landlord shite I was used to.
Gahh I hate the term Vulture Funds being used for this vulture funds buy distressed debt pick it clean of any assets and then try to sell it off for profit.
Institutional property companies manage rental properties in a Professional manner. Well most of the time anyway.
Ah good to know they’ll represent and arbitrate without bias….
Downside is that reits are often very reluctant to rent to people with lower incomes or what they think are unstable jobs.
They prop up the rent to more than 2k euro for 1 bed apartment and then they demand that you have net salary where rent would be below 40% of it.
Company “A” shadow REIT, buys property, acts like a shity landlord. Tenants get annoyed.
Company “B” REIT buys same property. Fixed a few things.
Tenants are delighted.
Few months later, rents raised. But tenants think it’s worth it it because things get fixed. Also good press as the REIT are now a great bunch of lads.
Oldest trick in the book.
Housing associations are absolutely the way to go. Not this cloak and dagger shit, pull the wool over your eyes lying cunts.
This whole post and comments is obviously a bunch of shills.
Pretty low standard to beat
Interesting, in my experience renting from a big company has been horrible, one tried to stop my family visiting me cause they thought I was having a party (it was just my parents) they sent security once to another house they own to kick out family members visiting. I understand they don’t want the house wrecked by student parties but trying to stop family visiting is fucked up but also they must have had a camera or had people check the houses daily? Or maybe a neighbour was told to keep an eye out who knows.
Had another one where we rented by room, turned out one of the lads hadn’t paid rent in a while and then he suddenly moved out and disappeared, They decided to pin his bill on me saying I had missed payments…that added up to exactly 6 months rent.
I had to photocopy all my rent receipts…go down to the office and ask them what the fuck they were playing at? All red faced so they knew they fucked up, they thought they would get lucky and think I didn’t keep my receipts.
I stopped paying rent for the exact amount of my deposit about 2 months at the time. When I moved out I dropped the key and told them to get fucked. I should have done something more about the fraud but the company is long gone now and I was younger so I didn’t know what I could have done about it.