The average rent for apartments in Cork city has exceeded the €2,000 per month mark for the first time, and renters across the country are facing ever-increasing housing costs.
The latest quarterly report from property website daft.ie shows that renters in Cork city are paying an average of €2,005 per month – an increase of 11.9% on the same amount 12 months ago.
In County Cork, average payments for a property rose by 8.7% to €1,533 per month.
The continued rise is somewhat mitigated by the fact that prices are rising more slowly in Dublin. Nevertheless, this is the 14th consecutive quarter in which rents have increased across Ireland.
In the three-month period up to June, rents rose by an average of 2 percent nationwide.
This is the 45th time in 48 quarters over the past twelve years that rents have risen – a fact that economist Ronan Lyons clearly attributes to the lack of housing supply.
Responding to the latest report, Lyons pointed out that the chronic lack of supply in the Irish rental market is particularly noticeable outside Dublin, with the majority of new build stock over the past two years confined to the capital and its surrounding areas.
At the beginning of August, there were only 900 houses available for rent outside Dublin. In the cities of Cork, Galway, Limerick and Waterford together, there were only 150 rental properties at the beginning of this month.
“Supply is the single most important factor determining rent levels,” said Mr Lyons.
“We can see this in the development of rents in Dublin compared to other cities over the last two years.”
According to the daft.ie report, the average monthly cost of renting a property across Ireland was €1,922, up 7.3 percent year-on-year and a staggering 41 percent higher than before the Covid-19 outbreak.
While rents in Cork hit new records during this period, Limerick city was the worst hit in the country in terms of rental price inflation: here the average rent is now €2,107 – an incredible increase of 21.2% in one year.
In Dublin – where price increases over the past 18 months had finally cooled somewhat due to the emergence of new housing supply – rents rose by 3.5 percent over the past twelve months to an average of around 2,427 euros per property.
Galway city was the second most expensive city centre with average rents of €2,114 per month – an increase of 13.3 percent.
Lyons said it “remains the duty of policy makers, first, to develop a comprehensive understanding of rental supply dynamics and, second, to develop detailed plans to dramatically increase rental supply in all major rental markets over the coming years.”
“Ideally, now that the rental housing shortage has existed for over a decade, we would be talking about a gradual spread of the solution rather than a return to the core problem,” he added.
“Without new rental supply, it can be assumed that pressure on rents will increase in the future – which will make affordability even more difficult for people with regular incomes.”
