Rents in Ireland fallen to lowest level in ten years Article Published: 15:23 17/11/2009 Article Classification: The Maroccana Fund
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Rents have fallen to their lowest level in a decade in Ireland, to an average of 771 euros (£683) a month, the latest property report revealed today.

Irish housing website Daft.ie recorded a 4 per cent fall in the last three months with the Dublin market hit harder than anywhere else.

Rents fell by more than 18 per cent in the year to October 2009, with average monthly rent across the country now down from more than 1,000 euros (£886) last year to under 775 euros (£687) last month.

Dublin continued to show the biggest falls in rent coming down by 5 per cent over the last three months, the report found. It said rents in Galway remained static, while rents in Cork and Limerick cities fell by 2.5 per cent.

Ronan Lyons, economist at Daft.ie, warned that the continued drop could disrupt the Government’s plan for bad-bank Nama.

“These recent falls in rent have pushed the average rental income back to levels last seen in 2000, which has much wider implications,” he said. “Nama was predicated on rents and yields remaining high between now and 2020.”

Mr Lyons warned that the bad-bank plan was based on property priced growing by 10 per cent and that the housing market would be less attractive to investors if rental values continued to fall.

“Currently the yield on residential property has risen by just 0.1 per cent in the last year, to 3.4 per cent on average, compared to the Nama benchmark of 6 per cent, ” Mr Lyons said