I think all landlords are familiar with the phenomenon of tenants leaving an apartment and not paying the last month’s rent. So, you keep the deposit but there’s nothing left over for damages and cleaning. Or a tenant leaves owing more than a month’s rent (and damages and cleaning). The legislation/PRTB works against landlords in these instances by protecting bad tenant in their apartments.
In 2012 we started asking for a deposit equal to one and a quarter month’s rent.
We didn’t know of anyone else doing it so we risked loosing potential tenants because of the increased cost to them. The thinking behind it was that it was only a small increase, but would give more protection.
We noticed that almost nobody questioned it and we don’t know of any cases where it was a reason not to take an apartment with us.
We didn’t notice any problem renting apartments and our deposits held are up by a quarter.
The greatest benefit of the increase is that instead of having tenants casually use their deposit as a last month’s rent, tenants have more to protect and don’t risk losing the extra quarter.
In 2013 we increased the deposit asked of new applicant tenants to one and a half month’s rent and we took some statistics.
Under 12% of people even questioned the increase.
None of these had a negative response and only one person in 2013 said the deposit was too high for them to take the apartment (we manage over 200 apartments in Dublin city).
We’ve worked in property management since 1987 and have never seen such tenant compliance since introducing this. It’s a long way from fully covering the incompetence of the PRTB but has had a huge affect on the smooth turnover of tenants. I understand it’s a landlords market at the time of writing this post, and people are willing to pay extra for now but it would benefit the whole industry if it became the normal in Ireland for landlords to ask for more than one month rent. I believe the industry is so risky at the moment because of the legislation / PRTB that the market should adjust by asking for extra security. If it did became the industry norm it would not be a barrier to any landlords
