RENT REDUCTIONS are crashing through the floor. Most know a landlord whose tenants are returning to foreign climes and is desperate to find replacements. Alas, not at the rent prevailing of even six months ago.

Tenants are wise and are bargaining hard for discounts on advertised rent. Invariably they get the reductions, as it’s a renters’ market out there.

Cast an eye on any website and note how landlords have been humbled, as in a one-bedroom apartment in Dublin’s Gardiner Street, reduced this week from €1,000 to €850 a month (Gandon Hall).

Eager to please has replaced “take it or leave it”, with flowery offerings of “newly refurbished” and “a gem not to be missed” where previously it was a case of upwards-only rent reviews.

Landlords are reduced, like their rents, from being a perceived rapacious class to a lowly supplicant class – providing no doubt satisfaction to those who believe in the curve of history. But providing little comfort to their bank managers.

The “Flight of The Tenants” has also raised the awful prospect of replacements with swelling numbers of SW (social welfare) or the ultimate nightmare of the Irish landlord – native students.

Many landlords were spoilt with eastern European tenants who were impeccable tenants and invariably kept the rented accommodation in pristine condition.

Weep, weep for the newly impoverished landlord class. We have not seen their like since the heady days of Land League agitation in the 19th century. As for the most recent species, replete with tank-size SUVs and weighty bunches of keys during the bullish years of the boom, it may be another century before we see their like again.