RTB rules eviction notices sent to tenants in Rathmines’ Tramco building were invalid

Renters in the Tramco building in Rathmines are tenants not holiday makers, meaning  the notices to leave sent to them are invalid, an adjudicator for the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB) has ruled.

Property owner Wellington Hospitality Ltd has appealed the decision, maintaining that the building is an aparthotel. That appeal will likely be heard by an RTB tribunal later this year.

Thirteen renters living in six flats in the Tramco building – a block next to the Lidl in the heart of the village – challenged their evictions at the RTB.

One of them, Abdul Rahman Ali, has lived in Tramco for 14 years and has a lease from a previous owner. “I consider this place home,” Ali said in November last year, three months after he first got the notice.

Planning records refer to the building as a hotel. The original permission, granted in 1997 for the building, was for an aparthotel with 51 rooms.

But Ali says it hasn’t operated as a hotel as long as he has lived there.

After a hearing in December, an RTB adjudicator agreed. “Applicants are not residing in the dwelling on a holiday basis,” says an adjudication report.

The owner, Wellington Hospitality Ltd, was not represented at the hearing.

Malcolm Stuart, the manager of Wellington Hospitality, said by phone on Monday that, “This building has never been anything but a hotel.” When Wellington Hospitality bought the building, it paid a higher rate of stamp duty because it was a commercial premises, he said.

Stuart wasn’t at the RTB hearing because he had requested an adjournment to seek legal and planning advice, he said.

He had also cited health issues in correspondence to the RTB on 12 December, eight days ahead of the hearing. The RTB should have acknowledged the request in the adjudication report, he says.

An RTB spokesperson said that they cannot comment on individual cases, but in general they don’t usually reference requests for adjournments in adjudication reports.

“Requests to adjourn a hearing are only accepted in exceptional circumstances,” says the spokesperson. “The requester must submit supporting documentation with their request.”

A home or a hotel?

Thirteen residents of Tramco disputed their notices of termination and rent increases.  Two of them, who live together in one flat, shared their adjudication report.

In their case, the adjudicator found that the residents were tenants and that the notice of termination that they had received in August 2024 was not valid.

Two rent increases had also been invalid, the adjudicator ruled. So these residents were due a refund of €5,600 in overpaid rent, the report says.

That the building was originally an aparthotel was not relevant, said the adjudicator.

Hotels are excluded from the Residential Tenancies Act, “however there is no evidence before the adjudicator that the property is functioning as a hotel”, says the report.

If the building is operating in breach of its original planning permission that doesn’t impact on the tenants’ rights, says the RTB report.

Stuart says that all residents were aware of the temporary nature of the accommodation, because they had been told in writing that it was a hotel. “We always operated as an aparthotel,” he says.

Did Tramco provide the services and amenities usually available in a hotel?

Stuart says the staff provided a range of services at Tramco, depending on what residents required. “I provided lots of amenities that were tailor made to suit the people.”

Out and in

As the long-term residents have moved out of Tramco in response to the eviction notices Wellington sent them, they have been replaced by people experiencing homelessness.

In November 2024, a spokesperson for the Dublin Region Homeless Executive (DRHE) said it had contracted the building for homeless accommodation.

“The DRHE contracted the property as vacant and was not made aware of any affected persons,” the spokesperson said.

Stuart, the manager at Wellington, said none of the people living at Tramco became homeless because of his conversion of the building into emergency accommodation.

He helped to source alternative accommodation for those who had not been able to find it themselves, he said.

“Not one person was made homeless,” Stuart said. “I wouldn’t have that on my conscience.”

In November 2024, some current residents had said that Stuart had offered them alternative accommodation, but some felt the accommodation offered was a step down.

One alternative was a big house with a kitchen shared by around 20 people, said Naeim Elshamy. At Tramco, each studio has its own kitchen.

Tramco renters said they also worried about having fewer rights within the first six months of a new tenancy, given a landlord can end a tenancy without any reason during that window.

Stuart says that since the building is a hotel it can be legally run as homeless accommodation. In the future, it will revert to a commercial hotel, he says.

A spokesperson for the CATU Rathmines Ranelagh branch said the government is responsible for creating a system where running homeless accommodation is a profitable enterprise.

“The Tramco situation is a result of decades of deliberate government policy that favours private profit over people’s safety and security,” she says.  “The government needs to end for-profit emergency and asylum seeker accommodation and provide decent and accessible quality public housing for all.”