Rent inflation has slowed over the past year for Dublin accommodation, however, across the county rents have risen by 101% since their lowest point in mid-2011.
The cost of a single or double room in Dublin has seen the lowest rate of increase since 2012, with rental cost roughly 4% higher in the second quarter of 2019 than a year earlier, according to a report by property website daft.ie.
The average cost of a single bed in Dublin city centre is €673, an increase of over €270 since 2011, although the average rental cost for a city centre single bed has seen a slight drop since the start of the year.
Average northside Dublin rent for a single room stands at €571, compared to around €320 in mid-2011, which is also slightly cheaper compared to early 2019.
Southside rental cost for a single room, now €604, continued to climb this year. The cost of renting a single room on the southside has almost doubled since mid-2011, when it was approximately €360.
The report shows that while rent inflation in Dublin is slowing down, rental costs in other regions continue to rise at a dramatic rate. In Cork, rents are 7% higher than a year ago, while in Galway city rents are 9% higher.
Ronan Lyons, economist at Trinity and author of the report, said the slowdown in rental inflation “will be welcome news to tenants and policymakers, among others”. However, he said the situation is “more likely driven by limits to affordability than improved supply”.
Pierre Yimbog, the president of Technological University Dublin Students’ Union (TU Dublin SU), wrote that students “will once again swap summer exam anxiety for the stress of a frantic search for accommodation – a basic need – in a critically undersupplied and financially inflated rental market” in the report’s introduction.
Yimbog said that enough affordable accommodation is needed for students “to drive up supply that will in turn drive down demand and costs so that the only stress one associates with university is a healthy amount of exam nerves – not where to find or how to afford a space to live”.
The Union of Students in Ireland (USI) are asking the government to establish public housing authorities to build affordable student accommodation and provide capital grants to institutions to build on-campus student accommodation in October’s Budget, Yimbog said.
“We also need a major increase in the supply of affordable purpose-built student accommodation. Rents in most of the recently built units average over €1,000 per month, and while they have all sorts of deluxe features, such as cinemas, gyms and games rooms, they remain beyond the budgets of most students.”
Separately, USI have today joined calls from housing charity Threshold for the government to implement a deposit protection scheme in the private rental sector to defend tenant’s rights.
The daft.ie report follows a survey suggesting that the cost of on-campus accommodation has risen above the cost of private rental accommodation for the first time, published earlier this month.
The survey of 600 parents of college students in Ireland also showed that the price of accommodation rental has remained the largest cost associated with third-level education.
In March, Dublin became one of the top five most expensive cities for rental accommodation in Europe, overtaking Paris for the first time.
