‘D-Day’ warning for Kerry renters as landlords sell up over new regulations

By Alastair Tibbs, The Kerryman

A Kerry councillor has warned of “D-Day” for renters as stringent new rental rules are encouraging landlords to sell.

Councillor Dierdre Ferris is concerned that Kerry’s homeless services will not be able to cope with the potential influx of people cast out of the lower end of the rental market.

Cllr Ferris said she had seen an increase in the numbers of termination notices handed to tenants in recent months, with landlords looking to sell their properties.

From March 1, rental agreements will at minimum be six-year tenancies and landlords will be unable to put their properties on the market without tenants being left in situ.

Many smaller landlords are now seeing the market conditions as unviable and are selling out of the industry altogether.

“We’re coming up on March 2026 which is going to be D-Day for a lot of our tenants and housing applicants,” said Cllr Ferris at the council’s annual budget meeting this week.

“The difficulty I have is that there are reports that there’s going to be a mass exodus of landlords from the market…I feel like we’re very limited when it comes to our homeless services and it is something I have raised repeatedly.”

While the allocation for homeless services was raised by 6.5 per cent by Kerry County Council for next year, Cllr Ferris thought more expenditure was necessary, given the evolving situation in the rental market.

She didn’t believe the four homeless hostels available in Kerry, two which are smaller premises in Tralee, would be enough to handle the potential consequences of a contracting rental market.

“If the exodus that is projected with landlords comes true, we’re going to see a significant problem,” she said.

“The smaller the supply is, higher rents will go…our homeless services are at capacity at the best of times anyway.”

Paul Stephenson at the Tralee-based real estate agency, Sherry Fitzgerald Stephenson Crean, said they had seen “quite a lot” of landlords selling out of the sector.

He said the rental market is contracting in the county, with rental properties moving into the hands of homeowners.

“A lot of the stock that is being sold currently and for the last 12 months, a lot of it is rental stock that was rented previously. A very high percentage of that is being bought by home occupiers.”

“The supply of rentals is being reduced number one, but when tenants move out, landlords are saying ‘I think I’ll sell now because if I rent again after March, it’s a six-year gig’.”

He also pointed out that any properties that are sold post-March may come with a six-year lease and thus be useless to many home occupiers.

Community Action Tenants Union (CATU) have recommended a ban on evictions to protect households against a “tsunami” of termination notices.

They also believe rent pressure rules don’t go far enough, and what is needed is a “significant and immediate” reduction in rents.

Michael Sheehan, Munster CATU organiser, said: “Many of our members are paying up to and exceeding 60pc of their income just to keep a roof over their head — money that should be circulating through local shops, services, and communities rather than being extracted into the pockets of developers, investment funds, and landlords.”