increase deposit for sitting tennant

beaufoy

I believe a normal deposit is now 2 months, but my tenant who has been renting my apartment for several years has only paid one month....Am I allowed to increase the deposit to two months

Silverfish

Why do you think you need to? You agreed one month at the time.

dudara

Why do you want to? You can't use that money for personal reasons as it is the tenant's deposit. Plus if they've been a good tenant for several years, why increase the deposit?

Sleeper12

If you've had a good relationship with the Tennant for years & they've been good tenants for years why even think of rocking the boat?
A lot of people couldn't just come up with another month's rent out of the blue like that. I can't see it being legal anyway.

GGTrek

beaufoy wrote: »

I believe a normal deposit is now 2 months, but my tenant who has been renting my apartment for several years has only paid one month....Am I allowed to increase the deposit to two months

Before you can make this request of deposit increase you need to wait for the 4 years end of the part IV tenancy, you provide a section 34(b) termination notice well before the 4 years are up (at least 112 days before or 224 days if they stayed 7 years or more):

https://www.rtb.ie/docs/default-source/notice-of-terminations-landlord-pdf/sample-notice---terminating-before-a-further-part-4-commences-16-01-2017.pdf?sfvrsn=2

In such case you are back to square one with the tenants, you can negotiate anything but the rent, since rent should follow the (anything but) normal rent-review rules: for example expenses for common areas, LPT, agents costs, administrative costs, .... You provide a new lease agreement starting on the day after the 4 years expire (remember that the next lease will be for full 6 years from day 1) and you set your new conditions (among them the new amount of deposit).

Increased deposit will come in handy when the tenants leave the apartment, in my experience (tens of tenancies) you will not know if the tenant was good or bad until you know how he behaves when he hands over his termination notice or he simply tells you that he is leaving (RTA only applies lightly to tenants in Ireland, their downside realistically is only the deposit unless they have done major damage and only if they work). A few will try to use the 1 month deposit as the last month rent and many  will know that minor damage was caused and will not want to pay for it: the incidence of this last case is very high: I would say 1 in three tenants in my experience since minor damages are easy to cause over a long term tenancy (broken chairs, stained mattress, scratched sofa, holes/stains in the wall, ...) and they have no idea of how expensive it is to fix them in Ireland (a few seem to live in a bubble of their own).

Basically with the new rent regulations introduced on Christmas eve 2016, the landlord only moment of freedom of negotiation with the tenants is: (a) when a new tenancy starts (b) when the 4 years/6years of part 4 have expired. Before 2016 you could negotiate rent within a reasonable set of market parameters every year and cover your risks with just the single parameter called rent, now you need to negotiate everything else, because rent negotiation is highly restricted (very soon RPZ will be extended to the whole of Ireland, this will be very popular with the media and an inexpensive vote winner for the parties, my prediction is Nov/Dec 2017)