Government is taking city renters for a ride

A three-bedroom townhouse on Presentation Road was advertised on Daft.ie in May with a monthly rent of €2,400. That’s two thousand four hundred euro – per month!

Now, it looked very nice and modern and it was brand spanking new. And it is in a lovely convenient location, a hop, skip and a jump from Shop Street.

For the same price you could rent a two-bed terraced property at Long Walk, also advertised on Daft.ie. So, one less bedroom but you have the added bonus of fantastic views of Claddagh and Nimmo’s Pier to compensate.

But an annual rent of almost €30,000 for a three-bed or two-bed city centre house is out of reach for most people. Who can afford €2,400 per month?

Experts say that you should spend no more than 30% of your gross income on rent. In order to keep to this rule, you’d need to be pulling in well over €7,000 per month, or more than €90,000 per annum.

Suffice to say they won’t be occupied by teachers, or Gardaí, or nurses or most ordinary hard-working single people. Even for couples, that’d be expensive.

And with rents like that, it’s easy to see why practitioners in other better-paid professions are struggling to rent while also saving for mortgages.

Average rents in Galway city are now €1,400, according to the latest Daft.ie report. That’s up by 6.1% year-on-year.

Average rents for a one-bed (€1,040), two-bed (€1,145), three-bed (€1,288), four-bed (€1,488) and five-bed (€1,627) have increased by between 2.4% and 7.3% in 12 months.

Obviously the two properties on Daft.ie cited above are above-average, primarily because of their location. But even the average rents for average houses in average locations are far in excess of what average people can afford.

Even renting a room has escalated. The average rent for a single room in the city centre is €460, up 18.6% in a year; it is €544 on average for a double room, up 16.2%.

These are supernormal profits. And that’s in a year when student demand was suppressed due to Covid-19, and competition from Airbnb rentals is down because there are few tourists. What will it be like when we get back to ‘normal’?

Galway Simon has consistently highlighted the problem of homelessness and lack of housing supply – and has predicted it will get worse.

Galway city is a Rent Pressure Zone. That’s supposed to mean annual rents can’t rise by more than 4%. The statistics prove otherwise. In reality, what it means is that everyone renting within the zone is under pressure.

The Government must act. If it doesn’t, Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and the Greens will discover that there’s an inverse relationship between the cost of renting in Galway city, and their popularity in elections.

(Photo: The CEO of Galway Simon, Karen Golden. Based on rental costs in Galway, her predictions that homelessness will increase make sense). This is a shortened preview version of Bradley Bytes. To read more, see this week's Galway City Tribune. You can buy a digital edition HERE.