Sean Murray:  I'm lucky to have found a place to rent — many others must feel hopeless

There were 5,735 eviction notices issued to tenants in the second quarter of this year after the no-fault eviction ban was lifted, new figures show.

The listing was only online for about 20 minutes.

One of those “nice location, nice place” ones that probably gets hundreds of inquiries.

The eagle-eyed housemate spotted it, and sent in the generic “we’re really nice people, we promise, please let us live here” email about six minutes before the ad was taken down.

Irish Examiner reporter Sean Murray: 'We were right place, right time. We got lucky. Many others won’t be.'

It was all very quick then. View the place, sign the lease, pack up our things.

Phew. We’ve found a place to live. With two months to spare before we get evicted.

We were right place, right time. We got lucky. Many others won’t be.

According to new figures from the Residential Tenancies Board, there were 5,735 eviction notices issued to tenants in April, May, and June of this year after the no-fault eviction ban lifted.

This was a huge increase of almost 1,000 on the first three months of the year when the ban was still in place. Still, our household was one of the 4,753 that got our eviction notice in January, February, and March. Our one was sent shortly after the Government indicated they’d be lifting the eviction ban.

These stark figures came on the same day a bleak report on the availability of rental accommodation by Daft.ie laid bare the difficult situation renters with an eviction notice are facing into.

Amid the surge in market rents, there was what was described as an “extraordinary shortage of rental accommodation options”. 

On the first of this month, there were fewer than 1,200 homes available to rent on the platform nationwide. With over 5,000 households facing eviction soon and homelessness already at record levels, it’s clear that the numbers don’t look good.

In his analysis for the latest Daft.ie report, TCD associate professor Ronan Lyons painted a bleak picture for the people getting evicted in terms of the availability of alternative accommodation.

“While Dublin has lost existing rental homes due to landlords selling up, so have other parts of the country,” he said. “Indeed, only in Dublin has new supply had any chance of offsetting the terminations recorded by the RTB.” 

Couple that with the detail actually provided by the RTB and that picture gets bleaker.

If supply is helping to offset the 2,298 eviction notices issued in Dublin in the last quarter, then that is most welcome and needed. But what about the 720 eviction notices issued to households in Cork, the 321 in Galway, the 205 in Limerick, and the 173 in Waterford?

Mr Lyons noted that in both Limerick and Waterford cities, there were just seven homes to rent at the start of the month.

He said: “Technically, in the case of Waterford, that’s an improvement on two on the same date a year ago. But nobody would argue that a single-digit number of homes is anywhere close to adequate for some of Ireland’s principal cities.” 

Feeling lucky

All of this isn’t to say that an eviction notice means that people will enter homelessness when they get the boot from where they live. My housemates and I were lucky enough that if it did come to that date when we had to move out and hadn’t found anywhere, we could go back to our parents.

I’m sure many people in their 20s and 30s frequently see posts on their social media being like “I/my friend is looking for a new flatshare” and the like. It may not be an ideal size, it may be much more expensive than they’d have liked but many will end up finding somewhere.

I’m paying around 10% more in the new gaff than I was paying before. And again, I’m considering that lucky. 

These are relative luxuries compared to what families facing eviction with little options face.

And it’s that bigger picture that keeps intruding when we hear such big stats thrown around.

Month after month, the number of people homeless in Ireland keeps reaching new record levels.

At the time of the discourse over the Government lifting the eviction ban, the narrative from the coalition was that homeless numbers rose under the eviction ban anyway. The counter from advocates was that it was a sticking plaster helping to paper over the cracks and was buying time for longer-term solutions to be put in place.

But they lifted it anyway. And homelessness reached a record 12,600 people at the end of June. 

The Government is pledging to ramp up housing supply with a plethora of support schemes to try to encourage house building along with schemes to help first-time buyers get on the ladder.

But with homelessness surging and eviction notices skyrocketing in the short term, it’s hard to see hope on that horizon for now.