Two women from Brazil who rented rooms in a four-bedroomed apartment in Brunswick Street, Dublin 7, are not entitled to be compensated by their landlord for being scammed by the “lead tenant” to whom they paid the rent, a Residential Tenancies Board tribunal has ruled.
The tribunal was told by one of the complainants that she moved into the four-bedroomed apartment in December 2020, where three other tenants were living, including the second complainant. After being interviewed by one of the tenants, she was offered a room for €600 a month.
The complainant said she was told by the tenant who interviewed her that the landlord did not want to share her contact details.
Up to August 2022 she paid rent of €600 a month to a former tenant who no longer lived in the apartment, after which she began paying the money to another tenant who “took over as the lead tenant”, according to the tribunal report.
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This person, a man, told her by way of a WhatApp message in July 2022 that the rent was going up to €650 a month. He also told her that his girlfriend was moving in. A year later, he told the complainant the rent was again being increased, to €690 per month. In November 2023, the man told her she would have to leave the accommodation and gave her one month’s notice. She left in December.
The second complainant said she rented a room in the apartment from August 2020 to May 2024 and sourced the accommodation through the same tenant who interviewed the first complainant.
She said she paid her rent to first one tenant and then a second before, in August 2022, beginning to pay the rent to the man who was described to the tribunal as the lead tenant. She paid this man €690 a month up to March 2024, when he left, after which she paid rent directly to the landlord, but at a rate of €633 a month.
[ Tenants who had refused to vacate house ordered to pay arrears of €12,600Opens in new window ]
This complainant “made complaints regarding the behaviour of [the male tenant] as set out in her written submissions prior to the hearing,” according to the tribunal report.
“He controlled the times that she could come and go from the dwelling and her use of the kitchen. As she had no contact details for the landlord, there was nothing she could do.”
The landlord told the tribunal she had dealt with one tenant going back to 2013, who took over the entire apartment after which “there were students coming and going from time to time”. This tenant, a woman, acted as the lead tenant.
When this woman went back to Brazil, the tenant who interviewed the two complainants took over. “The rent was always paid to [the landlord] in one lump sum by whoever was the lead tenant at any given time,” the tribunal report said.
The tribunal was told the landlord increased the rent on the four-bedroom flat from €2,288 per month to €2,500 per month in August 2022, and from €2,500 per month to €2,650 per month in September 2023.
The increased rates, based on four tenants being in the apartment, were the equivalent, respectively, of €625 and €633 per tenant per month. No review notices were served prior to the rent increases.
A male witness with the same family name as the landlord said it was clear from bank and tax statements that there were “discrepancies” between what was received in rent from the lead tenant and what the tribunal was told was collected from the complainants.
The tribunal decided the landlord was in breach of the Residential Tenancies Act in not providing the tenants with her contact details. While some matters were the responsibility of tenants to sort out between themselves, the tribunal said, the failure to provide her contact details resulted “in the tenants suffering upset and stress and a feeling of isolation.” It awarded each of the complainants €500 in damages.
It also decided that €907 should be paid to the first complainant and €1,330 to the second in compensation for the unlawful rent increases imposed by the landlord in August 2022 and September 2023. However, it decided the landlord was not responsible for the excess money collected by the lead tenant that was not passed on to the landlord.
The lead tenant “was not the landlord’s agent and therefore the landlord cannot be held responsible for the increases in rent which he imposed on the tenants and which the tribunal accepts were never passed on,” the tribunal said.
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