Risk of unnecessary evictions due to confusion among landlords and renters over new rules

THE NEW RENTAL rules have caused confusion among renters and landlords, the national housing charity has warned.

Threshold has said that some landlords have been issuing eviction notices to tenants due to misunderstandings around whether the new rules apply to existing tenancies or only those beginning on or after 1 March 2026, when the legislation kicked in.

The charity is also concerned that some landlords may get new tenants following the changes, mistakenly thinking that they’re then allowed to reset rents to market level.

However, rents can only be reset if a tenant leaves voluntarily or when the six-year tenancy ends.

Threshold is a not-for-profit organisation which helps people, particularly those experiencing poverty or exclusion, to secure housing. 

In the first three months of this year, 63% of new cases opened by Threshold related to security of tenure.

Of all new cases opened, 46% of clients had received an eviction notice, and a further 17% were worried that their landlord was going to end the tenancy, but they had not yet received a formal notice.

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Some 2,372 households who engaged with the charity in the first quarter of the year were at risk of homelessness.

Threshold is highlighting a number of issues that have arisen as a result of the new rules, including their effect on affordability.

“The charity is concerned about ‘constructive evictions’, where tenants are effectively forced to move out because landlords fail to maintain the property or provide essential services.

“The landlord may then present the departure as voluntary and use this to increase the rent to market level under the new legislation,” a spokesperson explained in a statement.

These resets, they said, could accelerate the rate at which rents are rising, undermining “the longer-term security the legislation is intended to provide”.

Renters who are in receipt of the Housing Assistance Payment (HAP) may find the already-limited number of properties available to them reduced even more, the charity said.

Threshold is calling for HAP limits to be increased and kept aligned with anticipated market rent resets.

Houseshare confusion

The rental regulator recently got involved in a disagreement about what should happen when people move into an already existing house-share under the new rules.

The Journal reported that multiple tenants are contending that their landlord, property firm Ires Reit, has changed its approach to swapping out tenants since the new rules changed in March.

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Ires Reit said it no longer permits the “addition of new tenants to existing leases”, nor subletting in its apartments, and any new tenancies (i.e. where one or all tenants have been replaced) would be subject to the new rules.

However, the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB) said: “Where one tenant leaves and is replaced by another tenant, the new tenant joins the existing tenancy.”

The regulator added that a “new tenancy can only begin in the dwelling once all tenants that were party to the existing tenancy” have left.

One Co Kildare landlord who contacted The Journal last week showed emails demonstrating he had warned the Department of Housing about potential confusion over the rules in cases where one tenant in a house-share needs to be replaced.

The landlord, who asked for anonymity, was told to get independent legal advice on his query and that the Department could not advise him on a “hypothetical” scenario.

He told The Journal that he found it “strange that the department that has written this legislation is not able to interpret its meaning” for cases like his.

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