Mr. Patrick Davitt:

On the point made by Deputy Butler, the same happens throughout the country. In Mullingar, where I live, a person gets €390 to rent a property but the rent is €500. The person can make up the money or not get the property because somebody else will pay that amount of money. Even when the landlord chooses the tenant he or she has to come up with the extra money. The scheme to increase that rent is good.

That could be down as an extra part of the rental to the local authority or to the health board in the area or whatever the case may be.

I do not know whether an increase of the rental allowance on a full-scale basis is very helpful. As auctioneers, we might not see that it is all that helpful. It is certainly helpful in the areas that Deputy Butler talks about, in which lot of the moneys really are too low. As for the black economy, I do not know where the money goes, if the landlord takes it or what he does with it. That is really the landlord's own concern. There is no doubt that people do have to pay it.

As is stated in our submission, the landlords as we know them - the typical landlords who have one or two properties - have been the cornerstone of these properties and of supplying these houses for years. Many people talk now about the professional landlords coming to Ireland in the form of these vulture funds. We do not believe those professional landlords are the correct way to go. Not too long ago in the newspapers they wrote about one particular Canadian fund's AGM at which they discussed how they had increased the rental prices of houses in Ireland by 22%. When they increase the rent by 22%, everybody follows on. If one big company here with maybe thousands of apartments does this, the next thing that happens is that Mary Jo and Jackie Joe and everybody who comes in to the auctioneers wants to increase the price. Auctioneers have a problem with this as well but it is not a problem that auctioneers can solve.

We believe that a landlord with one or two houses should get an allowance like the one landowners get. If a landowner over 40 or 50 years of age gets €10,000 or €20,000, he or she can write it off at the end of the year. Deputy O'Dowd mentioned the rental scheme. Someone renting out a room can write off €12,000 tax free. Why do they not offer the same for landlords?

I do not represent landlords, incidentally. I am just talking about this because as auctioneers, we speak and hear about this all the time. I and Mr. O'Flaherty were talking at the weekend to an individual who lives in Maynooth. He has two people living in his house and earns €10,000 tax free. If he was a landlord and he was getting €10,000 for one house, he would have to pay the 50% tax on it. Why would there not be a scheme in place such that if he rents his house for five or ten years, he would be given a tax allowance for it? That is what they do in conacre land renting and now they have tried to move into long-term land renting. Why do they not offer landlords those breaks? Why can the county councils not take some of these people who are on social and the like on a long-term basis? The landlord would get his break. He would happy enough to rent on the house again to whoever the county councils want and everybody would be happy. That is not the way at the moment.

The landlords with one or two houses are practically being priced out of the market by the professional landlords who are coming this way. Professional is the word. The more properties they get their hands on, the further the rental prices are going to go. Somebody who owns one block of 100 apartments can put the rent up by 10% at the stroke of a pen. Everybody's rent then goes up. If there are 50 landlords in that building, the chances are that some of the apartments will be under-rented. Many landlords will under-rent properties because they are happy with their clients. Some landlords are never going to go back to their tenants and put the rent up because they have a very good relationship with them. As we stated in our submission, we believe that professional landlords who come into Ireland should offer something in the way of new housing. For them to buy these houses from NAMA at an under rate and to come in here and start pushing up the rents is wrong. If they buy 100 houses here at under value, they should build 100 houses to go with it.