Mr. Tom O'Brien:

I will address Deputy Barry's questions in the first instance. His questions and the Bill he is putting forward demonstrate a certain ignorance of the sector and I would welcome the opportunity to put some facts around the matter. His Bill is the latest in a series of misguided, populist measures that are interfering in the residential rental market. The impact of his policies and pronouncements on the sector are probably hurting some of the people he espouses to represent.

The committee has been debating the Bill for two hours this morning and I wonder has supply been mentioned once in that time. Deputy Barry has asked questions of the witnesses and for anecdotal evidence about the sector. If the Deputy was attuned to and following what is going on in the sector, he would be well aware of the supply issues. I have some statistics that are not my own but are publicly available from various Daft reports. I took the time to look at them last night and went back as far as the Daft quarterly bulletin that was issued in December 2012. There were more than 8,500 properties available to rent nationwide at that time. The graph from the same period in 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015 shows that stock continually declined until December 2017 when it hit a low of 3,250. In December 2018, the figure was 2,800. It is clear there is a supply issue.

Sherry Fitzgerald is one of the leading estate agents in the country and probably the most respected in the research it conducts. It has categorically stated that fewer than 40% of rental properties put on the market are subsequently acquired by investors. If ten buy-to-let properties are brought to the market, approximately four of those properties come back into the rental market. There is a rapid decline and deterioration in stock. That is not because people have, all of a sudden, decided the rental market is unattractive. They have looked at the tax cuts and provisions and legislative changes since 2009 and decided there are easier ways of making money. They can put their money elsewhere without being subject to legal, tenant or funding risk. They can make the same return and more elsewhere.

The supply issue must guide legislation. All of the provisions that have been directed at the rental sector in the past ten years have been anti-landlord and anti-investment. We have population growth of a minimum of 0.5% every year so 200,000 additional people are residing in the country since 2013. Supply is the issue. If Deputies Barry and Jan O'Sullivan were doing their jobs, and were actually interested in addressing the supply issue, they would have brought legislation through the Dáil which saw tax incentivisation for people to invest in property and sought an easing of the administrative and legislative burden on landlords in an effort to bring more properties to the market. That has been proven to reduce rent. Rent halved during the recession when a surplus of property was available. The only way to resolve the rental issue is to bring more supply to the market. The proposed Bills are incredible at best, misguided from a neutral position and, if it were not so serious an issue, it would be funny.

The idea of introducing more legislation that would knock further investors out of the market is mind-boggling. There are constitutional issues around property rights which are pertinent to the proposals, as well as serious GDPR issues regarding the tenancy register which Deputy Casey mentioned. The country's best legal minds will not be able to find a way to protect both the property owner and tenant's details without breaching EU-wide data protection legislation. There are a couple of hurdles to jump on this.

On the specific issue of how we know that investors are selling, we took soundings this week from an investor in Deputy Ellis's constituency. There are 30 properties on the rental market in Dublin 9 this morning. An investor was renting a two-bedroom apartment in the area. He took 72 calls in respect of that property and over 50 of them were from people seeking accommodation as a result of their landlords selling their properties. The Deputy wants more relevant data on whether owners are selling up. They are. It is entirely obvious. If Deputy Barry was involved in the business, which he clearly is not, he would be well aware that this practice is happening.