In hundreds of apartments rented out by the same company, renters are on licences with few rights

When Biatriz Maeda looked to claim the renter’s tax credit, to take the sting out of her monthly living costs, she hit an obstacle.

She wasn’t a tenant but a licensee, she was told in an email from Leevin Ireland, the company she rented from.

“You do not have exclusive possession of the property nor do you meet any of the criteria for tenancy,” the email says in Portuguese.

Its service was adapted for international students, it said, with flexible licences, shared contracts, and other advantages.

Asking around, Maeda realised this was common, she said. “Talking to others, I noticed this practice is widely accepted.”

Maeda came to Dublin to study English, she says, and paid €600 a month from July 2023 to February 2024 to live with four others in a two-bed apartment at Dorset Square on Gardiner Street Upper.

Because her contract was a licence not a tenancy, she felt she had nowhere to go to follow up on the issue of the tax credit, she says.

Central to Maeda’s complaint is the question of whether renters in shared apartments, who didn’t all move in together at the same time, are licensees or tenants. A lack of clarity in the law leaves the door open for these arrangements to be set up under licences.

To confuse matters further, tribunals at the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB) have issued contradictory decisions as to when renters sharing a property are tenants and when they are licensees – including in two rulings involving renters in the same building.

Housing experts say the law needs to change.

Currently, most of those who are licensees can’t turn to the RTB to decide any dispute. How much they pay in rent isn’t restricted by rent pressure zone (RPZ) laws, and licensees can be shunted out of their homes with little or no notice.

Nobody knows how many licensees there are in Ireland but it is a big issue, says Una Woods, an associate law professor at the University of Limerick. And  “I’m surprised it’s not a bigger issue, that more people aren’t talking about it”.

Whether the number is growing is also a major unknown – with implications for debates around trends in rental supply, renters rights, and the impact of government policies.

In recent years, ministers for housing have tightened some protections for tenants – with rent caps, longer notice periods, and tighter restrictions on when tenants can be evicted.

Licensees, though, have been largely overlooked.

Leevin Ireland, which Maeda rented from, was founded in January 2018 and as of December 2023, had 56 employees. It has become a large provider of shared rentals in the city for newcomers.

Data from its maintenance portal suggests that the company rents out, or has rented out, more than 400 properties, mostly in Dublin and some in Cork. Most of them did not, as of early March, have registered tenancies.

It doesn’t own the properties. Of those addresses, 250 are ultimately owned by the same property fund, Vestry General Partner Designated Activity Company.

But as the “licensor”, Leevin Ireland is responsible for letting out and managing the homes and renters.

A solicitor for Leevin Ireland said the company “currently manages temporary and short-term accommodation options for students who attend to study in Ireland”.

“The business works extensively on the quality of its accommodation provision. Its licensing model operates along the lines of aparthotels and short term accommodation providers as this is the market it serves,” he said.

Vestry hasn’t responded to queries.

Renting to rent?

The apartment where Maeda used to live is one of those that is owned by Vestry General Partner Designated Activity Company.

But her licensor was Leevin Ireland, says the contract.

Exactly what the arrangement is between Vestry and Leevin Ireland is unclear. Neither answered queries about that.

If Vestry has rented apartments to Leevin Ireland via a tenancy agreement, then those tenancies agreements should be registered with the RTB, says Ann-Marie O’Reilly, a national advocacy manager at the housing charity Threshold.

But the Dorset Square apartment isn’t registered with the RTB, and neither are hundreds of others.

Vestry didn’t respond to a query about what determines whether a property has a registered tenancy or not. But licences, outside of purpose-built student accommodation blocks, do not have to be registered with the rental regulator.

Across the city, Audrey Madden says she has also been trying to work out the relationship between Leevin Ireland and Vestry.

Madden, who lives in Saint James’s Wood on South Circular Road in Kilmainham, noticed that an apartment on her stairwell, owned by Vestry but that has been rented out by Leevin Ireland, wasn’t registered with the RTB either.

She complained to Dublin City Council, wondering if it was short-term lets, meaning rented for less than 14 days at a time.

Council officials were shown three separate long-term contracts for the flat though, one for each bedroom, when they stopped by, she was told in an email from Máire Devine, who is now a Sinn Féin TD, but was then a local councillor.

Madden’s complaint is that she doesn’t think apartments in the block are supposed to be let like that.

The title lease says premises can only be used as a “single private residence”. But it looks to her as if there’s some kind of co-living, Madden says.

Neither Vestry nor Leevin responded to queries about renting on licences, and how that relates to the title lease.

Who gets a licence?

Renters can be licensees rather than tenants in a kaleidoscope of situations.

Some arrangements are widely accepted as governed by licences: if someone is staying in a hostel or guesthouse, sharing with the landlord as a lodger, or if the home is tied to a job.

Others, though, are disputed. In particular, whether renters who share houses, or bedrooms, with other renters chosen by the landlord, are licensees or tenants.

Critical to the difference between a tenancy and a licence is whether the renter has “exclusive occupation” and how that is defined, say Woods, of the University of Limerick, and O’Reilly, of Threshold.

O’Reilly says she thinks renters in shared homes are tenants, whether they share a bedroom or not.

“Your landlord is not living in the home with you,” she says. Collectively, those renters have exclusive possession, she says.

One exception is when a tenant rents a home, lives in it, and sublets other rooms, she says. If she were to do that she becomes a head tenant. “The people letting the rooms off me are licensees,” she says.

Those licensees can also, after six months, ask to be made tenants, she says. “The act says that the landlord cannot unreasonably refuse that request.”

Another exception is if a group rents a house together and so are all on the same tenancy agreement but then one person moves out and someone new moves in, she says.

If the lease is not updated, that newbie would technically be a licensee, she says. Still though, says O’Reilly, that newcomer could try to demonstrate in a dispute that in reality, they were a tenant.

Woods, the associate law professor at University of Limerick, takes a more cautious view. “The law in that area, in relation to a shared-house arrangement, isn’t clear.”

The problem is there’s no case law on the question in Ireland, she says.

The counter-argument is that if a home has shared common areas or a shared bedroom, then you don’t have exclusive possession so it can’t be a tenancy, she says.

Landlords can also put in certain clauses or language in contracts that strengthen its case that a renter doesn’t have the protections of tenancy, she said.

Maeda’s contract with Leevin Ireland says that “the licensor will be entitled to enter [the room] at all reasonable times to carry out the agreed (if any) services and carry out any necessary repairs.” The licensor also has a key and can enter at any time, it says.

A licensor might also include a line that they have the right to move the renter to a different room, Woods says, which would increase the likelihood a court would find it is a licence. “That’s called a mobility clause.”

It’s easy to see how landlords might prefer licensees rather than tenancies given the protections are less onerous, says Woods.

But an RTB tribunal would look beyond the language in the agreement and see what happened in practice, she says. “They are, I suppose, wise to the temptation that might exist there.”

Even given all that though, an RTB tribunal could still hold that someone living in a shared house is a licensee. Says Woods: “We’ve kind of conflicting decisions.”

Two cases, two rules

In September 2022, two tribunals at the RTB ruled on cases involving the same shared eight-bedroom house.

In one case, the tribunal members found that the RTB had no jurisdiction. In other words, that it wasn’t a tenancy.

The room wasn’t a self-contained dwelling or a bedsit, as it needed to be for the Residential Tenancies Act to apply, they said. A bedsit would have a sitting room and typically a small kitchenette, the tribunal said.

But in another case, involving two different tenants sharing another room in the house, the tribunal ruled it was a tenancy.

The landlord’s representative said it was a licence because tenants didn’t have “exclusive” use of common areas and a cleaner went once a week.

But rented properties are often shared, the tribunal said. The act hadn’t explicitly exempted common house-share arrangements, they said, and applies to any self-contained residential unit including what is commonly known as bedsit accommodation.

As that tribunal read it, lawmakers had included bedsits to make sure that if a bedroom is self-contained, but other rooms are shared, a renter isn’t left outside the act.

What counted as a bedsit was undefined with no set format and so broad enough to include a bedroom with some furniture, they said.

They cited other past RTB rulings, which also leant on the fact that bedsits fall under the act.

That supported the idea that even if a tenant didn’t have exclusive occupation of the whole house, and they shared common areas, they could still be a tenant, they said, because they had “a control in common over the entire dwelling”.

Rents

A recent advert for accommodation rented by Leevin Ireland shows €625 a month to share a two-bedroom and one-bathroom apartment with four other people in Barrow House in the Docklands.

If all five people were paying €625 a month, Leevin Ireland would be getting €3,125 a month for that apartment.

Meanwhile, an advert listed by an estate agent on Daft.ie in December 2024 seeks €2,400 a month for a different two-bedroom and two-bathroom flat in the same complex.

Under current rules for rent-setting for tenancies in Dublin, landlords reviewing rents have to show that they are in line with other similar properties in an area. Rents can also only be raised by 2 percent a year, or the rate of inflation, whichever is less.

But those on licences, aside from students in the big student housing complexes, don’t benefit from that. “There’s really substantial protections there for tenants in relation to rent increases that wouldn’t apply in case of a licence,” says Woods, the associate law professor at University of Limerick.

“The other major protection that is there is you’ve very good security of tenure,” she says, “you have a right to a tenancy of unlimited duration now.”

“You’re entitled to an awful lot of notice,” she says. But for licensees, “the arrangement would be governed by the licence agreement itself”.

O’Reilly, of Threshold, says she doesn’t see why many licensee situations couldn’t be brought under rent restrictions, just as those in the big student housing complexes were in mid-2019.

Woods says the government should be able to reform the law and extend tenancy protections clearly to shared-living type arrangements without too much trouble, for cases where the landlord isn’t living there too.

Maeda, the former Leevin renter in Dorset Square, said that if having a tenancy would have gotten her the tax credit, she definitely would have wanted a tenancy over a licence.

“But I didn’t dive deep into the legislation to fully understand which type would provide better legal protection and financial reimbursement,” she said.

Paying €600 a month to live in the two-bedroom apartment on Gardiner Street Upper with four others did seem outrageously expensive to her, she says.

“But with the real estate crisis in Ireland, we’re pretty tied up,” she said. “We know that this reality affects both locals and foreigners.”

Do you rent in Dublin? Is your contract a licence? We would like to hear from you about your experiences. You can reach us at lois@dublininquirer.com