PRIVATE rental costs surged six per cent in Limerick City between June and September, with the average price of renting a two-bed apartment now €2,108 a month.
That’s according to the latest rental report from Daft.ie, which shows that rents have gone up 3.4 per cent in the city and 3.1 per cent in the county, six per cent overall year-on-year.
Nationally, rental levels are two thirds higher than during the peak of the Celtic Tiger.
According to the Daft.ie listing for Limerick on November 14, there were 30 properties to rent in the city and 52 in the county, ranging from €2,750 a month for a one-bed apartment to €3,000 for three-bed home in Castlemungret.
Sinn Féin TD for Limerick Maurice Quinlivan called on the government to “abandon its plan to strip tens of thousands of renters of vital protections against rip off rents” as the Daft figures show “rents in Limerick continue to spiral out of control”.
“Too many people are being locked out of the rental market and this has real societal impacts. In Limerick we have countless families living in overcrowded homes with many more on our city streets and availing of temporary emergency accommodation.”
The Sinn Féin Deputy said that “despite the deepening rental crisis, the government has just published the general scheme of their bill that will tear the rent pressure zones to shreds. If passed, this legislation will remove the one, albeit limited, protection that renters have and will see rents for new and existing tenants continue to spiral upwards.”
Labour’s housing spokesperson and Limerick TD Conor Sheehan said that single adults in homelessness have been virtually ignored in the government’s new housing plan and the lack of a specific strategy around getting single adults out of long-term homelessness is worrying.
“Minister Browne said on media that he cannot say when the homeless figures will start to fall, but the fact of the matter is that homeless figures cannot fall without a specific strategy for single adults in homelessness,” he said.
“To quote directly from the new housing plan ‘Single adult households account for around two thirds of households on social housing waiting lists and this proportion is steadily increasing every year.’
“However, with the exception of a line that says a ‘key focus will be to increase the supply of one-bedroom properties and four-bedroom properties to provide more stock to allocate to single adults and large families’, there is no mention of a strategy for single adults in or at risk of homelessness in the plan”.
The Daft report’s author Ronan Lyons, economics professor at Trinity College Dublin, said the market is “starved of supply”.
“Rents are now one third higher than they were just over five years ago and indeed two thirds higher than their Celtic Tiger peak.”