Mr. Patrick Davitt:

At the moment, if a tenant gets a notice the landlord wants to sell the property, they have the notice immediately and they know first that they are going to sell the property. At that stage, what we find at the moment from an agent's perspective is, tenants are looking at the possibility of buying a property long before the property comes on the market, so they would have a very good idea of whether they can get an adequate mortgage or not. Price is not that big a problem, because the property price register is there. People can look at that register and see the value of a property in their area. Granted, the landlord may be looking for more or less, depending on what way the situation is, but there is absolutely no reason the landlord and the tenant cannot come immediately to an agreement about the sale of the property, which actually happens in many cases. What is being given here is a right for the tenant to make the first offer - it can be called "first" or whatever but it is not first under the Bill because what it does is give the tenant an offer to bid on the property and 90 days to do that and then it gives them an offer to match the bid. Thus, tenants are not being given the offer to buy the property, but an offer to match a bid on a property. That is what the Government is doing. That offer, at the end of the second 90 days, could be 10% to 30% above the valuation of that property. Would many tenants be able to match that from their incomes? That is the problem.