DAFT Rental Report - Is it too optimistic ?

nohatnoswim

Hi All,

So, I've been eagerly awaiting todays daft rental report and got a chance to read it a few minutes ago.

Here's my thoughts on it,....

The report is based on rental asking prices - ie the price the agent/landlord puts on their advertisement on Daft.

Based on the discussions we are seeing on the board here, it appears that Prospective tenants are sucessfully negotiating down on these asking prices and closing the deal with a saving.

So I think it's fair to say that the figures they have for Q1 09 are on the high side.

Looking back to Q1 08, I personally don't believe that prospective tenants had this much power if any power (based on the market's percieved grounds to negotiate on) in the tenants hands. So the asking prices from Q1 08 are likely to be far more in line with the closing prices than Q1 09.

That would say to me that the real closing price decrease is actually higher than DAFT can publish based on their data. O how I suspect DAFT wished they had a real closing price module on their site that they could trust !!!

I believe the same issue was discussed about the housing price report last month.

So if their trend were to continue across the year, the rental market could take a 30% - 40% hit on average in the real world. The psychology that Brian Devine (contributor to the report) speaks about is so important to the market - and the stockpile of houses along with the clear messages about negotiation coming from the media and most cortex's out there will surely say this is going to continue to spiral.

As a renter, I hope so. In the meantime tomorrow is negotiation day for us and our landlord ;-)

tedstriker

It's a great time to negotiate. In fairness the people that own these apartments and houses are the ones that gambled on property so they should take the brunt of this downturn, not the average renter.

Here you can see the Daft.ie rental index. The trend is positive for those of us who rent.