Yet again there are proposals to make changes to the Residential Tenancies Act that will make things more difficult for landlords but do nothing to deal with the key issues currently faced by landlords such as excessive taxation and rent arrears.
There are three main areas of change proposed:
- Rent transparency would see the average rent paid in certain areas published by the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB).
- Changes to notice periods – For those with tenancies of six months or less, the notice period will remain at 28 days. For tenancies between six months and a year, the notice period will increase from 35 days to 90 days. It will rise to 120 days for all tenancies between one and five years.
- It would become a criminal offence for landlords to increase rents in rent pressure zones above the four per cent allowed annually. The level of fines that can be imposed on landlords would also increase significantly.
The proposed changes would also increase the powers of the RTB to investigate cases pro-actively, currently a case must be take to the RTB before action can be taken by them.
Yet again the proposals are one sided in nature and do nothing to support landlords or promote the development of a viable and sustainable private rented sector.
Nothing has been done to reform the tax treatment of rental income despite the many calls from both independent experts and indeed tenant advocates to do so.
There also needs to be an urgent review of the RPZ rules to address the issues where many many decent landlords are tied into artificially low rents.
More to follow….
