Why is one of Ireland’s biggest landlords evicting so many of its tenants?

Gabriel Catanoiu rubs the base of his back.

He works in construction, he says. Block houses, extensions, insulation, fire-proofing. Or rather, he did.

Before he was signed off, after a fall from a ladder at work left him with a painful slipped disc and in need of surgery, he says, sat on the edge of his sofa in his small dimly lit studio.

He is also being evicted – and facing into homelessness, unsure, he says, when he will have a stable place to recover from any procedure.

A few steps to one side is the kitchen he put in and, to the other, a cupboard he fitted. Underfoot is the floor that he laid. In front of him is a small coffee table, and beyond that a wall with a stock image of a beach, blue sea, a bowed palm tree.

Catanoiu has lived here for 14 years.

He has asked Home Club, the property manager for his landlord, if he can stay in his home, one of a few apartments in a red-brick terrace on Whitworth Road just north of the Royal Canal.

“I explained to them. I’m on disability payment. I’m waiting for my back surgery. Especially, it is winter time,” he says. “Where can I go in winter time?”

He is being evicted because, under current rules for older “Part 4” tenancies, the landlord can at a point in time end the contract for no reason.

His landlord, Xerico Limited, is one of 21 Cyprus-based subsidiaries of the Luxembourg fund LRC RE-1 through which it owns 2,036 rentals across Ireland making it one of the country’s biggest private landlords.

In 2023, the fund’s subsidiaries issued at least 191 notices to quit to tenants, shows Residential Tenancies Board (RTB) data. That’s equivalent to more than 9 percent of its homes.

It is also a greater rate than across the private rental sector as a whole – and a much greater rate than some other large institutional landlords.

As the make-up of Ireland’s rental sector changes, some housing policy experts have posited that institutional landlords offer greater stability to tenants than individual landlords. But the figures show that it matters which institutional landlord, and when.

Company strategies vary dramatically at different times. So too, then, does the risk for communities of instability and tenants of eviction.

Increasing revenue

RTB figures show that, within those 191 eviction notices issued last year, a chunk were issued on the same grounds cited to Catanoiu, that his Part 4 tenancy is ending.

LRC RE-1 subsidiaries issued 89 of these kinds of notices to quit in 2023 – and another 34 in the first half of this year, the figures say.

Neither LRC Group, nor the property management firm Home Club, responded to queries sent by email on 30 September, asking why LRC RE-1 is seeking to evict long-term tenants when Part 4 tenancies are up.

During a hearing at the RTB in July, Home Club’s manager Michelle Savage told a tribunal that she had sympathy for a tenant living in New Maltings, a complex on Watling Street in the south inner-city, who the landlord – the subsidiary Jersia Limited – was evicting on the same grounds.

But the tenant couldn’t buy the place because the landlord hadn’t evicted him to sell it, she said. It hadn’t decided what it would do next, she said.

“It may be renovated and upgraded and rented out again, or it may be sold,” said Savage, according to the tribunal report.

Apartments in New Maltings – where Jersia Limited bought 47 apartments for €7.1 million in April 2018, an average of €151,000 each – have seen significant hikes in advertised rents, alongside tenant turnover, in recent years.

Rent in 2017 for the tenant living in Apartment 11 was €750 a month, said a sales brochure. By May 2021, the property was being advertised online for €1,385 a month.

Queried on that in June 2021, a spokesperson for LRC Group said that those figures aren’t exactly comparable.

The brochure figure is the rent, they said. “The advertised figure includes more than just the rental component – such as car parking and service charges (which are all listed on the lease agreement).”

Rents at New Maltings are set in line with RTB rules, said the spokesperson.

Neither LRC Group nor Home Club responded to queries as to what it expects to do with Catanoiu’s apartment on Whitworth Road, where he currently pays €527 a month, once he has left. They didn’t say if they would intend any new tenants to pay extra charges on top of the rent.

Orkstake Limited – another LRC RE-1 subsidiary – was charging €85 a month in service charges and €300 a month for a car parking space on top of the base rent at a property in Tyrrelstown, shows a report from an RTB tribunal last December.

Eoin Ó Broin, the Sinn Féin TD and housing spokesperson, says that if there seems to be a pattern of a significantly high volume of eviction notices – and use of Part 4 grounds at a higher rate – by one institutional landlord, the RTB should investigate.

The RTB should look at whether it is possibly breaching rent-pressure zone rules when it retenants, he said.

The legality of adding extra charges on top of the rent, given laws capping rent increases at 2 percent a year, is contested.

Ó Broin says the Department of Housing should also change the law so that no tenants can be evicted on the grounds that their Part 4 tenancy has timed out.

The Department of Housing did revise the law once at the end of 2021. Now, if a tenancy began after June 2022, a tenant can’t be evicted on those grounds. But that doesn’t apply to tenancies that started before that date.

A spokesperson for the Department of Housing says that they opted to transition the change in like this after guidance from the attorney general. “Naturally over time, all ‘Part 4 tenancies’ will be of unlimited duration.”

Ó Broin points to how there have been other legal changes that have applied to all tenancies, retrospectively even, such as the length of notice periods.

The government needs to end the right to evict on the grounds that the Part 4 tenancy is up for all tenancies now, he says. “And then, if some landlord wants to challenge it, let the courts decide.”

Selling up

In October 2022, Tom Dunne, then – and now – chair of the RTB, said that big institutional landlords offer more stable tenancies than smaller landlords.

After all, the main reasons put forward by landlords issuing notices to quit – that they are selling up or need the property back for family – don’t apply to institutional investors, he said.

Indeed, about 75 percent of the notices to quit issued between Q3 2022 and Q2 2024 have said either that the landlord is selling or that a family member wants to move in, show RTB figures.

Some company landlords did issue fewer eviction notices than average last year.

In 2023 across the rental sector, the equivalent of about 8 percent of tenants were issued with notices to quit, show RTB figures.

Ires REIT issued notices to quit to 5 percent of its tenants, suggest RTB figures.

And, in 2023, Kennedy Wilson, another of Ireland’s big institutional landlords, issued notices to quit to 0.5 percent,  – although it’s not totally clear whether that RTB data does include all of Kennedy Wilson’s evictions or if some could be logged under its letting agent.

Still, at more than 9 percent, LRC Group surpassed its peers and the sector as a whole. Institutional landlords can evict ahead of selling too and LRC Group, unlike some of its peers, has also been doing that.

In March, Savage, of the property manager Home Club, said that the landlord Xerico Limited – another LRC RE-1 subsidiary – had earmarked “in the region of 100 properties that this landlord wanted to sell at the same time”.

The homes had been purchased as part of a larger portfolio, she said, during a case before the RTB challenging one eviction notice that had been issued on the grounds of sale.

The landlord was looking to offload some to reinvest in other properties, she said, according to the tribunal report.

That process is ongoing, company accounts suggest. In 2022 and 2023, Xerico Limited sold 53 of its homes, they show.

Meanwhile, Ireland’s biggest private landlord Ires-REIT, is also looking to sell hundreds of apartments.

But while it plans to offload 315 properties, its policy is not to evict tenants and to wait for natural vacancy and turnover, said a spokesperson for the company.

“It expects this programme to take up to 5 years to complete due to its standing policy of not evicting residents to sell units”, the spokesperson said.

The government’s review of the rental sector, published in July, did nod at the possibility of tightening rules around pre-sale evictions.

The government could “include provision for sales with a tenant in situ, particularly for professional landlords with multiple properties”.

Fear of the impact on landlord investment has stopped the government from making moves like this or improving security of tenure significantly in recent years, says Mick Byrne, assistant professor of UCD’s School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice.

All landlords will want at some point to recover their property to sell it, he says. “So inability to recover the property at any point, it would substantially change the nature of private rental housing as an investment.”

It’s unclear right now if lenders would lend to landlords to buy properties that aren’t vacant, he says, and also how big upgrades could happen if homes weren’t empty.

Countries that don’t let landlords evict to sell often have better tax incentives making the numbers add up for landlords, he says.

His attempt to square all this is to float the idea that government create six-year secure tenancies – so, landlords could only evict their tenants at the end of every six years, unless they don’t pay rent or wreck a place.

It would give tenants and landlords more certainty and predictability, he says. And, he says, be politically viable.

He knows this idea will get criticism, he says. People, after all, could still find themselves in a situation such as Catanoiu – being evicted from their home of many years through no fault of their own.

It wouldn’t be life-time tenure, he says. “My answer to that is that social housing and cost-rental are the solution to that problem.”

Ó Broin meanwhile says the Sinn Féin housing plan reiterates the party’s call to remove sale completely as a reason to end a tenancy. “Because it’s just not a legitimate ground.”

He would also tighten – albeit not scrap entirely for existing tenancies – the rules around recouping a home for a family member, he says.

The ideal as he sees it would be to eventually get to a situation where unless a tenant is breaching their contract – not paying rent, or damaging the property – they can stay as long as they want, he says.

“I lost everything”

Just because a landlord has issued a notice to quit doesn’t mean that a tenant always has to leave. The tenant may challenge the notice and it be found invalid, or the landlord and tenant reach an agreement.

A review of the RTB disputes shows that several notices to quit issued on the grounds of sale by subsidiaries of LRC RE-1 were found to be invalid because of a technicality around the statutory declaration.

Still though, the breakdown of different rates does indicate how varied companies can be, depending on strategies for managing the homes and where they may be in an investment cycle.

“Part of the variation is very much, what is their strategy in a given point in time,” says Maedhbh Nic Lochlainn, a lecturer in the Department of Geography at University College Cork. “What phase of the pattern are you looking at?”

She has researched how Ires-REIT managed its properties and evicted tenants during its earlier days – relying on the RTB’s database of disputes before data on notices to quit was available.

There looked to be peaks of time when it issued more eviction notices than others.

“Earlier, in RTB dispute records, around 2015 and 2016, they cleared essentially properties where people were in long-term arrears,” she says.

Notices to quit issued on the grounds of rent arrears also feature prominently among LRC RE-1 subsidiaries in the RTB database – with arrears for those eviction cases ranging from around €570 to more than €19,700.

Kennedy Wilson didn’t respond to media queries sent through its website, asking to talk about its policies around notices to quit, or to confirm the RTB figures.

Nic Lochlainn says that Kennedy Wilson’s seemingly low rate of evictions last year may be down to a different business model. They build rather than buy older rentals, and their customer base may be more affluent, with more screening of tenants, she says.

The trajectory and horizon of different companies varies so much, she says – and whether they are looking to stabilise or to gather a portfolio and sell it.

“I think that’s really important to unpick a bit because it’s particularly volatile at the moment,” she says.

On his sofa on 26 September, Catanoiu scrolled through his phone to show how hard he had been searching for a new place – even if he doesn’t want to move.

He isn’t doing nothing, he says, showing his emails on a bright screen. “Every day I do something.”

“See how many Daft emails. Daft, Daft, Daft, Daft, Daft, Daft,” he says. “Nothing, not even one email to send back to let me know.”

Catanoiu describes a spiral.

In the last year and a half, his mother passed, his daughter left Ireland with her mother, he lost his work and now – evicted by Xerico Limited through no fault – he has lost his flat, he says.

“In one and a half years, I lost everything,” he says.