Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2026: Second Stage
Dail Éireann — 2026-02-04
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Albert Dolan (FF), Galway East

They invested, provided rental homes and helped supply. They are coming to me with one fear above all others. They are afraid they will lose control of their own property. Vacant possession matters. I want to put this plainly. It is absolutely right that tenants have security. It is absolutely right that we restrict no-fault evictions. It is also vital, however, that property owners can have vacant possession of their asset if they choose to sell, especially small landlords. For many small landlords, that property is not a business. It is their pension, their safety net, their retirement plan and their family's long-term security. While the Bill recognises that a property can be sold at any time with a tenant in situ , we have to be honest about what that means in practice.
I want to raise a very practical point being raised with me again and again, which is that if small landlords are forced, in effect, to sell with tenants in situ , the valuation of their property will be crippled. This will be for two reasons. First, the buyer pool collapses, so if a property is sold with tenants in situ , it is no longer a home for a young couple to buy but only an investment asset. That means the only buyers are investors, which is a far smaller pool. Second, the properties become valued on yield. Here is the reality. For a small landlord with one property, after tax, maintenance, insurance and compliance costs, and after the risk that comes with the system, the yield is low. For large investment funds, however, the yield calculation is completely different. They can buy and sell portfolios at scale. They can spread costs. They have professional management, better financing and better tax structuring. We are creating, and I say this respectfully, a situation where the State risks pushing small landlords out while strengthening the position of large-scale corporate ownership. I think that would be the worst outcome.
The Bill does recognise a distinction between small landlords and large landlords and that is welcome but I urge the Minister to be extremely careful that, in practice, we do not end up with a system where large landlords have disproportionate ownership of the rental market and small landlords face the same practical consequences but without the scale, resources or tax efficiency to survive it. If we lose the small landlord sector, we lose supply and flexibility in rural Ireland.
From a rural Ireland perspective, if we lose the small landlords, they will not be coming back. We sometimes think institutional investment will step in and take their place but in these small towns, there is no institutional investment. No institutional investment is coming to east Galway. We are not going to see large apartment blocks. As a result, when a small landlord sells and gets out of the market, that rolling rental supply we depend on in our towns is going to be gone. These properties might be for somebody who needs one for a year, somebody who moves into an area to settle or a worker looking to relocate. These are all examples of people who need to rent in our areas and there will not be a rental supply if it is sold and gone.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-02-04/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:35+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-02-04