A new head of the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB) has been appointed at a time of escalating rents and shortage of availability.
Rosemary Steen, former chief executive of the Design & Crafts Council Ireland (DCCI), is also taking charge of an agency getting to grips with technological shortfalls and delays in resolving disputes.
Ms Steen has held a number of difficult posts – on the leadership team at EirGrid as well as at Vodafone, Shell and Ibec – but is now entering one of the most challenging sectors.
As housing supply continues to be a huge issue for the Government, recent data from Ms Steen’s new organisation, essential to understanding the market, has raised eyebrows.
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The latest RTB figures show registered tenancies increased from 213,177 in mid-2023 to 230,006, despite a common assumption landlords were leaving the rental market.
But it flags some issues – many landlords have been operating illegally and not registering. And despite the RTB figures showing a significant number of properties, those available to rent on websites are at historically low levels.
There has also been a clash of data sets. Census 2022 recorded 330,632 households in the private rental sector, but last December the RTB put the number of registrations at just 246,453, throwing up a confusing disparity of more than 84,000.
This was ultimately explained by the presence of informal rental agreements that do not require registration, such as among family members, as well as many other properties simply not having been registered.
[ Ireland’s rental market is so dysfunctional even the data does not make senseOpens in new window ]
The RTB said its tally and the Census were “two completely different data sets collected with different purposes at different points in time”, but the glaring contradictions still drew concern, notably from chief economist at Bank of Ireland, Conall Mac Coille.
There are more systematic challenges facing Ms Steen too. During an Oireachtas committee hearing last July, her predecessor, interim director Owen Keegan, addressed the amount of time it took to resolve disputes between landlords and tenants, a key function of the RTB.
At that time, the average processing time for disputes was 9.3 weeks for mediation; 22 weeks for an adjudication; and 29 weeks for a hearing in front of a tribunal. Mr Keegan said the RTB hoped to get to a position by the first quarter of next year where disputes were processed within 16 weeks, a target presumably inherited by Ms Steen.
Mr Keegan, formerly chief executive of Dublin City Council, said it was dependent on resources being available to tackle the increase in cases coming before the board, which rose by a third between 2022-2023.
When announcing the new director, the Department of Housing noted that with tenancies continuing to rise, “extra staffing levels have been allocated to the RTB to enable them to manage their additional workload”.
Separately, Ms Steen arrives shortly after the RTB agreed to invest €1.5 million on a new computer system capable of handling large databases and identifying cases requiring investigation.
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