Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 2 July 2024
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government
Residential Tenancies Board: Discussion
3:00 pm
Mr. Owen Keegan:
May I add to that? We did a once-off piece of work which we now hope to repeat. We took all the notices of termination that were sent to us in quarter 4 of 2022 - there is a requirement that they be sent to us - and we followed up on all those properties to see what had happened to them in May of 2024. It was interesting. This was a preliminary analysis.
In approximately 75% of cases where intention to sell was one of the reasons given, the tenancy had ended and no new tenancy had been registered with us. In approximately 17% of cases, the same tenancy was in existence, so the landlord obviously decided not to terminate the lease. In approximately 2% of cases, the tenancy had ended and a new tenancy with a new landlord was in place. That does not seem unreasonable. In approximately 5% of cases, there was a new tenancy with the existing landlord. We are following up on those cases. They are not necessarily non-compliant with the legislation. There could be reasons. This is the first time we have tracked notices of termination and followed up after two years. Our data now allows us to do that. That is something we have to do regularly to generate possible leads for investigations.