Rents are expected to plummet in cities across the country due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Property website Daft.ie said the number of one and two-bed properties available to rent in Dublin has jumped by 64% since the start of the month.

The increase is believed to be down to the collapse in demand for short-term rentals – with no tourists coming in to take advantage of the thousands of AirBnB properties advertised in the capital.

Rents

Architect Orla Hegarty, an assistant professor at University College Dublin, said the increase in supply will drive down prices.

“It is also, of course, happening at the same time when some migrant workers may have left the city and where people are now planning to work remotely – maybe for a couple of months – and might have given up their rentals in town,” she said.

“But more significantly, we have a lot of students who are now gone online in the last week.

“So, we’ll have tens of thousands of students who don’t need to be in Dublin anymore.”

Dublin

According to Daft.ie, the number of rental ads around the country is up 13%; however, the increase largely concentrated in Dublin.

Ms Hegarty said landlords who were in the short-term market may now rethink their strategy.

“Now that the tourist industry has ground to a halt and flights won’t be coming in and people are nervous about travelling, a lot of those owners will be putting them back into longer-term renting, more traditional housing,” she said.

AirBnB

She said there were around 5,000 AirBnB properties available in Dublin in January.

She said the collapse is “bound to bring prices down.”

“I think we are going to see rents falling pretty dramatically fairly quickly,” she said.

Daft.ie economist Ronan Lyons said we still need to build many new rental homes in Dublin to meet demand.

“The scale is still small compared to overall need,” he said “With the Dublin rental market typically needing 1,000 homes a week to keep rents affordable.

“Thus, while a one-off shift from the short-term to long-term rental market may be welcome news for many, it does not change the huge underlying need to build new rental homes.”

With reporting from Josh Crosbie