'I heard a man say he was leaving Ireland over a rental dispute. That's why I took this job with the RTB'
Irish Examiner reporter Sean Murray with Residential Tenancies Board chief executive Rosemary Steen.
In an office overlooking Dublin’s main thoroughfare from O’Connell Bridge, Rosemary Steen is setting out why she wanted to be the director of Ireland’s rental watchdog.
A veteran of regulation and policy in the public and private sector, she acknowledges that she took the helm in September to lead the Residential Tenancies Board at a challenging time.
“It’s why I wanted the job,” she told the . “I’ve been a dedicated public servant in a number of different sectors that have faced challenges. I joined Eirgrid at a very challenging time. I do believe the way I can give back is to go into these really difficult situations and maybe take jobs that other people don’t want.
“What motivated me to go for this is I was actually in a restaurant listening to a gentleman who was moving to Australia, talking about why he was leaving Ireland. It was to do with a [rental] dispute that I felt could have been resolved through mediation but he was now leaving his home.
“I really felt that if we can get things in the rental sector operating correctly for people, people will spend time in that sector. They always have in Ireland, but we need to get that service operating in such a way that people can rent with confidence. It is their home.”
In the midst of a long-enduring housing crisis where many younger generations feel locked out of the prospect of home ownership, scrutiny will always be high on the watchdog tasked with regulating the sector.
And often in recent times, when the Residential Tenancies Board is making the news, it’s not been for good reasons.
Its move to make landlords register annually in 2022 — despite a positive step in ensuring robust data is collected and enforcement of the laws can be done more easily — ran into problems at the first hurdle as landlords and agents reported problems registering themselves on the new system online.
While it had planned to issue fines if tenancies were registered too late, it had to forego such penalties due to the unreliable system.
The regulator almost doubled the number of agency staff it was using to meet the “significantly high” volume of calls it was receiving.
The RTB only resumed charging late fees early in 2024.
Its then director Niall Byrne was candid about the issues at Oireachtas committee hearings in front of TDs and senators in November 2022. He said:Â
 “Unfortunately, that is a fact.”
He said the issues the organisation faced were “deep-seated” and “complex”.
Mr Byrne left his position after two years in the job in early 2024. Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien did not seek his resignation, his spokesperson told the at the time.
Other issues that arose related to the robustness of the RTB's data, or perceived lack thereof, after its own figures for how many private tenancies there were in Ireland clashed with the Central Statistics Office’s figures from Census 2022.
After both bodies put their heads together to try to figure out the discrepancy, the CSO concluded that around 25,000 more tenancies should likely be registered with the RTB than there are currently.
Another issue to the fore is enforcement of the laws around rent pressure zones — where rents can only rise a certain amount each year — and other requirements of landlords.
Speaking just after her first 100 days as director, Ms Steen was keen to stress that progress is being made at the RTB as the rental sector continues to grow in Ireland.
“One of the things that has happened is the RTB has grown, but it does need to grow more,” she said. “And part of what I’m trying to do as the new director is assess the areas that are working well, look at how we’re delivering and innovate more.
“And part of what we committed to when I came in was that we would put the priority on disputes first.Â
"I said, look, let’s reprioritise cases and make sure the ones that are most serious in terms of rent withholding, illegal evictions, those cases to move them very much to the top of the queue.”
She was able to point to statistics from the RTB to show that this has indeed improved in the last year, with adjudication, mediation, and tribunal hearings all significantly up in 2024 compared to 2023, with the average time for mediation cases down from 10 weeks to six.
In particular, she was keen to stress mediation as a way for landlords and tenants to resolve disputes and said this was much quicker than other methods available.
“It’s a very valuable resource for anybody who’s having challenges, whether you’re a landlord or tenant, to have a properly structured conversation, try and reach a conclusion, and not end up in a dispute,” Ms Steen said.
“And so in the past, maybe mediation wasn’t used as much, but as the new director, I’ve really been clear with everybody that I want to drive mediation first approach.”
But, given the watchdog’s remit, enforcement will also be key. And, at an Oireachtas committee hearing in the autumn, Ms Steen said that further legislative powers would be needed.
Speaking alongside the director in their Dublin office, the RTB’s head of investigations and sanctions, Emer Morrissey, said that, at the moment, it can only inspect a property once it has begun an investigation and after it was aware of an issue such as a tenancy not being registered.
“At the moment, it’s based on sending out information to the landlords, and not so much around actually being able to go out,” Ms Morrissey said.
“That is something we would really like to be able to do in the future, to go out where we suspect there’s a tenancy in place and see if there is. And then we can use our powers to either prosecute or sanction.”
Ms Steen took up the point and said that it’s “really important as a regulator that we do have the ability to knock on doors”.
“Obviously we’d use it judiciously,” she said.
“Where we believe there has been a good citizen report, which is compelling, or a very serious situation where there’s a major abuse underway, we do want the right, from time to time, to be able to knock on doors to validate if the situation warrants further investigation.
“Because the way that legislation is written, we can only do that once we’ve commenced an investigation, and in some of these situations, it doesn’t give us adequate powers, in my view, as the new regulator coming in.” Cases where the regulator has stepped in have yielded some hefty fines.
Ms Morrissey outlined one case where a tenant was overcharged €18,000 and the landlord didn’t repay the money, so they were fined the maximum of €15,000.
Other cases that have made the headlines included landlord Marc Godart who was hit with fines of more than €25,000 for failing to register tenancies and knowingly giving false reasons to tenants for why they had to leave their apartments.
Ms Morrissey said a recent campaign to identify breaches of rent pressure zone legislation will see them taking a more granular look at the data in the new year to identify “bigger breaches” of the laws.
Another area in which Ms Steen wants to see legislative change is the degree to which it can work with Revenue to conduct investigations.
“It will also give us access to more data and to share data with them around some of these rogue actors, you know, who are really causing a lot of damage in the rental sector,” she said.
“And we really want the ability to use both further, if you like, knock on door powers, but also further cooperation with other government agencies to ensure that people are not abusing their responsibilities as landlords.”
She also identified issues they have around sometimes identifying the owner of a property, as some landlords are using “multiple company structures to hide identities and move transfers of income between companies”.Â
“That’s why the co-operation with Revenue is so important, so we can understand what type of companies are involved in these arrangements,” she said, adding that the RTB would be actively pursuing landlords who are not complying.
A key aim for 2025 is the creation of a new online disputes platform that it hopes to launch in June which will allow people to lodge evidence, check what stage their dispute is at, and the outcome.
Ms Steen said it will “really transform that service”, but this kind of transformation will need to be adequately resourced.
“I have to say the minister [Darragh O’Brien] has been extremely supportive to me since I started,” she said.
“We did get an 8% increase in budget allocation this year. So I don’t want to underestimate what we’ve already been given, but the key here is that we have to invest in digital.”Â
Ms Steen said they will bring a digital roadmap for all this to Government when it is ready, and that should ensure more rapid turnaround in terms of investigations in future.
On the landmark Housing Commission report, which made multiple recommendations for changing the rental sector in Ireland, Ms Steen said that policy was a matter for Government but her organisation stood ready to act on whatever policy direction that may take.
She also said that, despite a widely-shared narrative that landlords are fleeing the sector en masse, their data shows that, while some are leaving, more are also joining which goes against this prevailing narrative.
With annual registration, she said they can now stand over their data and said it is the “truest picture” of the situation.
“That’s not to say that individual people won’t see individual apartments for sale or individual people leaving, but the question is, what are the statistics saying? And the last set of statistics are clearly saying that the number is up.”
Ms Steen was also clear that, while they would be collaborative with stakeholders, she would be “clear and tough” in her role as a regulator too.
“We can communicate a certain amount, but there are some hard lines here,” she said:Â
"We have to step in and ensure the appropriate follow-through is applied and I won’t hesitate to do that as the director.”
With over 230,000 registered tenancies in Ireland, and perhaps many thousands more not properly registered, the importance of a robust regulator that is protecting tenants’ rights cannot be overstated. It’s a common experience for Generation Rent to share horror stories of their own rental woes.
At the close of the interview, Ms Steen paused for a moment when asked if she’d ever had a bad experience herself while in the rental sector.
“I would have had... challenges,” she said. “I think the good thing was my landlord kept communicating with me. In the end, I bought the apartment off him.
“He did try to ask me to leave but I was lucky that I was working at the time and I was able to pull together a deposit. I was very lucky.”
Ms Steen said she even secured a discount on buying the property given she had been a tenant of the landlord selling up.
“You do have to have a working relationship,” she added:
“So, if everybody can put a relationship to the fore of a rental agreement, it can end up with a good outcome for everybody.”
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