AROUND Christmas time last year a 31-year-old professional woman found herself scouring the small ads, taking the DART around Dublin, looking for a place to live. She had to leave her last home, a four-bedroom house she shared with three others in Blackrock when, without warning, the landlord introduced a rent increase of just over 50 per cent.
Joan does not want to be identified because she is still waiting for her landlord to return her deposit. At the height of her accommodation search she was registered with three home-locating agencies and remembers one night "being utterly disgusted" at the prices being advertised for a basic room in a house.
She lives in Crumlin now, and pays what she says is a reasonable rent to a friend who owns her own home. "Honestly, I would have despaired about getting anywhere to live if I didn't have a friend who was in a position to rent out a room," she says.
Joan is one of the lucky ones. According to the survey by the Irish Auctioneers and Valuers Institute featured in the second Bacon report published this week, rents in Dublin rose by 24 per cent in the 12 months ending November 1998, but industry sources would suggest this is a conservative estimate.
Most estate agents recount stories about people, especially young couples, desperate to find a place to live but priced out of a market which shows no sign of slowing down.
And the reason? Part of the blame must go to the first Bacon report, according to Mr Ronan O'Driscoll of Hamilton Osborne King. His figures reveal that this time last year a standard one-bedroom apartment in Dublin that cost £450 a month would cost £650 now. The rent increase is closer to between 35 and 40 per cent than 24 per cent and is, he says, "the biggest leap in rental values ever."
"The prices had been stagnant for three years until the Bacon report. Now it is impossible to get anything decent in Dublin below £400," he says.
He cites three main reasons for the price explosion. The first is the increase in people looking for rental accommodation because rising property prices mean they can no longer afford to buy.
The second is the boom in the corporate rental area which until relatively recently was a small market. And the third is the lack of supply.
"This has occurred because of Bacon, which by introducing stamp duty and other measures succeeded in taking the investors out of the market. Investors walked away from the property scene so nobody was buying any property to rent out. The increase in rental costs was inevitable in this context, and now there is a vicious circle where people who couldn't afford to buy can't afford to rent," he says.
Closing the door to investors was a good stop-gap measure and did signal a halt to property prices, he says, but now the investors should be encouraged to come back into the market if the rental climate is to improve.
One property manager who deals daily with the hard-luck stories of disappointed would-be tenants paints a depressing picture of the current environment. There is the young couple who have been forced to leave a one-bedroom apartment in Leeson Street and now will be lucky to afford a bedsit in Rathmines.
THEN there is the young professional woman who is paying £625 a month for a one-bedroom apartment in Stillorgan and the landlord is considering adding his management fees in the rent. "I had a landlord on the phone the other day who will probably get £3,500 a month for his Foxrock home but still was telling me to `push, push, push'," she says.
According to Ms Amanda Davies of Christies, this change in the expectations of landlords has added to the problems for young home-seekers looking to rent. "Landlords are calling us saying `I hear rents are going through the sky. Get me a corporate tenant'.
"They don't want young people sharing, with the result that perfectly nice professional people are not getting a look in," she says.
Especially when they are competing for places with workers from the Continent who have a rental budget from their big multinational employer of around £900 a month.
According to Mr Fintan McNamara of the Irish Property Owners' Association, the rise in rental costs is far less significant than suggested. "Our research indicates that the teacher, the nurse or the guard is paying around the same percentage of their salary in rent as they were 20 years ago," he says.
While he agreed there was a minority of his members who would avail of the situation to increase rent prices, "the vast bulk are not interested in taking every penny they can".
Mr Kieran Murphy, director of the National Housing Organisation, Threshold, says one of the things his agency is noticing is that it is dealing with more people on the middle part of the market. "These are people in their mid- to late 20s, earning reasonable salaries who are coming to the end of one-year leases and being faced with a 25 per cent increase in rent," he says.
Tenants are also unwilling to go to landlords to complain about any faults with the accommodation because they fear it will result in a rent increase. "The increases are eating into their capacity to save, mortgages are at an all-time low and they feel they are feeling fleeced," he says.
Asked whether it was wrong of landlords to take advantage of this opportunity to cash in on their investment he said: "Landlords are not charities, but there is such a thing as a fair return, a fair profit". Nobody would broker an argument that unless you can pay for health or education you shouldn't get it, he adds.
What has been welcomed by those concerned about rising rent prices is the report's recommendation that the security-of-tenure issue is tackled. Longer tenancy agreements will give tenants the capacity to plan better for the future.
According to Mr Ronan O'Driscoll of Hamilton Osborne King, landlords "are completely blameless in this thing". He says "if a shop owner can sell cakes for £1 instead of 50p then why shouldn't they?".
The problem is that with their property assets increasing in value, mortgage repayments lower than ever and now escalating rent levels, the State's landlords seem to be eating their cake and having it, too.