Sir, – Newton Emerson’s take on the financialisation of housing in Ireland could benefit from some clarifications (“Moral panic about build-to-rent apartments overlooks their obvious advantages”, Opinion & Analysis, February 13th).
Claimed advantages such as build-to-rent apartments are “largely immune to the problems of speculation” seem to ignore the number of times that many of the sites on which they sit and the buildings themselves have been sold, each time making handsome profits for the flippers and inflating land values for society as a whole. The phrasing of rent “rises are set out in tenancy agreements” as an advantage is confusing. Rent and the way it can be changed is a part of tenancy agreements for all private rented sector tenants as set out in the Residential Tenancies Acts.
Although “sub-letting and short-term letting are generally banned”, I am aware of build-to-rent developments where entire blocks are reserved specifically for short-term lettings, much to the annoyance of other tenants.
The proliferation of build-to-rent development has displaced housing built for sale, leading to a huge outflow of households from city centres to the surrounding counties and farther afield looking for homes to buy, not rent. These households are cut off from their family support network, and often forced into expensive second car ownership due to poor public transport, exacerbating urban sprawl and making it much more challenging to hit our climate emission targets.
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The proliferation of vested interests and lobbyists across the media extolling the virtues of build-to-rent, while ignoring its social and economic consequences, should indicate how lucrative it is. Indeed, in no country that I am aware of has the build-to-rent sector contributed to a fall in rents. – Yours, etc,
Dr LORCAN SIRR,
School of Surveying and Construction Innovation,
Technological University Dublin,
Dublin 1.
