A woman whose husband had died and wanted tenants to leave her Co Kerry property has secured a ruling from the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB) that the two tenants leave within 28 days and pay rent arrears of more than €12,600.
An RTB tribunal heard that the tenants, a man and a woman, had been living in the house in the Killarney/Kenmare region since 2003, initially at a rent of €400 per month but more recently at a rent of €500 per month. A warning notice had been issued to the tenants in March 2023, at which time the rent arrears were €5,934.
The tenants said they had stopped paying rent because of issues with the water supply, but the tribunal said this was not an issue before it, that the tenants could have brought a case to the RTB over their allegations about water, and that they were not entitled in law “to stop paying their rent”.
The tenants told the hearing they had received a notice of termination in April 2023 “but said they had nowhere to go. They said they were on the council housing list and they had no intention of becoming homeless.”
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The owner of the property told the tribunal her husband had died in recent years and she had informed the tenants of her intention to sell in the circumstances.
“She said the tenants had informed her that they would try and find alternative accommodation, but when they didn’t move out, she engaged a solicitor to draft a notice of termination,” according to the tribunal report.
The landlord said she accepted that the tenants had always taken good care of the property but did not accept, as they asserted, that they had always paid the rent on time, up to the point where they stopped paying rent.
The tenants asserted that the increase in rent to €500 had been unlawful, and should not be used to calculate the rent due, as the property was in the Killarney rent pressure zone, where there was a cap on rent increases.
However, the tribunal decided that while the postal address of the property said it was in Killarney, it was in fact in the Kenmare area. The landlord said Killarney was used in the postal address as including the word Kenmare in the address would slow delivery of the post. The tribunal noted that the property was not in the Killarney local electoral area, which is the area that has been designated a rent pressure zone.
The tribunal ruled that the tenants should leave the property within 28 days, and said that in deciding on how much time to give them, it had taken into account that they had been overholding on the property since the expiry of the valid notice of termination served in May 2023, and had not been paying any rent.
It also decided the tenants should pay the landlord arrears of €12,600 within 28 days and continue to pay rent at a rate of €16.43 a day until they vacated the property.
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