Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 10 October 2023
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government
Analysis of Private Rental Sector Discrepancies: Discussion
Mr. Cormac Halpin:
I thank the Deputy. Regarding AHB rentals, basically we started looking at this work, as we mentioned, around July, when we were in contact with the RTB and the discrepancy became obvious. We did an initial high-level matching exercise that indicated to us that it looked like there might have been about 1,000 properties where the householder indicated they were in a private rental situation but the RTB data indicated they were an AHB. We are not generally in the business of changing the responses that people give us in the census. That is what we produce from the census outputs. What is important is that it said to us that there is value in undertaking this matching exercise, and to properly quantify, scope out and actually do the line-by-line matching exercise so we can give a more definitive figure, as well as the other-----