The eviction ban

What you need to do is to add Donald to your ignore list, it makes life a lot simpler. They don't care about the eviction ban they just want to argue. If everybody was against it they would be for it. Just to argue with people. Add them to your ignore list and move on

There has to be a balance here- it will realistically take 3 months between notice periods and what not- but not 6 months or over 1 year like many landlords are experiencing.

And Im talking about the “won’t pay” brigade, not those making an honest effort or temporarily out of work- im not advocating ruthlessness with one months rent missed but there are too many people out there taking advantage of the government not supporting landlords.

Again the government are misusing the landlords to hide the real problems out there.

You need to protect landlords from loss, not encourage it though.

If there was an easy way to chase down and recover money owed by tenants who didnt pay the rent while you were trying to evict them then that would be good.

The only way to do that with 3 months notice and a guarantee of them beiong out after that 3 months (and arent the bleeding hearts looking to reduce the amount of deposit that a landlord can charge in advance. Not to mention the fight they have with the RTB to be allowed to recover damages from the deposit) is to have 3 months deposit, plus a mechanism where they can be made to pay for damage they have done too. The problem is that tenants who choose to take advantage of the situation where they can get away scott free are ruining it for all other tenants.

Total shambles. And only the tip of the iceberg.

So now we're worried about scaring off the big bad institutional investors? They can handle buying and selling properties with tenants in-situ like they do in other countries. If it made sense to build and put tenants into a building, it makes sense to buy an already tenanted building.

Upper rank of Garda? Your basic sergeant?

Well, expose your ignorance here.

Garda rank structure in descending order:

• Commissioner
• Deputy Commissioner
• Assistant Commissioner
• Chief Superintendent
• Superintendent
• Inspector
• Sergeant
• Garda
• Reserve Garda

So what we have are over 5,000 properties coming on the market for families to buy. That is a good thing in the longer term.

You entirely missed the context. I said it was pathetic to blame SF housing objections for the housing disaster in Ireland. The factcheck article showed it to be misinformation. I never referenced the tweet as an excuse, pathetic or otherwise.

The rest of your post is quite the exaggeration and I am not going to lower myself anymore talking about a stupid tweet. I am not on Twitter and I don't like seeing tweets as headline news on our national news program. It's Donald Trump style discourse which is a race to the bottom. We are already dumbing down Irish politics to silly levels already. Stormy Daniels will be blamed next for our housing disgrace.

FFG are in power. They are the only ones with the levers to fix the housing disaster. Yet it's getting worse year by year.

Rent vs buy calculations are very hard to compare, there are so many inputs you have to make assumptions on in terms of interest rates rental yields etc.

If rents were cheaper than mortgage for comparison you could stick twice the difference pre-tax here into a pension fund for decades and have a bigger pot to pay that rent in retirement. But I don't think anything would work out well in terms of renting in retirement at the rental levels we have here and dropping rents isn't really an option when we need investment to build units and build costs are so high. All of these things will probably change of course over time and unpredictably. I'm guessing in Germany the retirees arent paying the rents we have here, they have some stable affordable rent and pension is designed to cover that.

You would be better off getting the full spectrum of why things arent working in Ireland and open up peoples eyes to what the problems actually are.

Then people would understand not just one of the straws that are breaking the camels back, but all of them. Only after that can you look for solutions.

If people dont want to look at the real picture in full, then they arent going to be solving anything, ever.

The devil is in the detail- championing just one option won’t solve this mess- tax reductions yes, state guarantee scheme for wrecked properties by tenants, yes BUT with lower rents charged- you can’t give it all to the landlords - there has to be conditions attached such as better standards of rental properties etc

You could not have such a state guarantee scheme. It would introduce a massive moral hazard into the system.

If you want a risk free investment, then you only get a risk free return.

It's funny because it is ingrained in your average joe here that it is a zero sum gain, landlords benefiting is bad for tenants and vice versa.

It's roadrunner Vs. Wile Coyote.

Whereas the reality is that landlords benefiting is good for tenants at the moment because the market needs more landlords and the long running trend is we have less and less of them as evidenced by the number of registered tenancies at the RTB dropping year on year for the last 6 years and the complete lack of a functioning rental market (all due to landlords 'cashing in' at the 'peak', turning their backs on 'outrageous profits' to stick their cash on deposit at minus 7% real return).

Normal rental yield is not a risk free return.

For example, if you have 80k to put as a deposit on a house, and you instead decide to park it at 4% interest, you would get 3,200 per year before tax. (That's even if you could get 4% which I don't think is available at the minute)

If you borrow 320k to put with your 80k and buy a 400k house, then after paying the interest on your loan (not the capital repayments) would you be happy if you were left with 3,200 after other expenses and before tax?

Or alternatively, with no mortgage you would get 16k interest per year before tax. Would you be happy with only 1,333 left of your rent after expenses (and before tax) if you bought a 400k house with cash? If we go to a more realistic 3% you are down to 1000 a month.

The above example doesn't even consider the additional inflationary protection/leverage you get from buying the property. Over the long term, it is extremely highly probable that the nominal value of your investment will increase. Whereas your original 80k in the bank will just stay at 80k.

And let me make the point a different way. If you have 80k to invest today, you put it with a 320k mortgage and buy a house, in 30 years your rental income will have paid for that house (plus more) and you will have a house. Do you think you could invest that 80k another way so that you'd be confident that the proceeds could buy that same house in 30 years?

The issue is that single-property landlords cannot diversify away the risks you refer to from having a bad tenant. They larger ones can.