Over 90 per cent failure rate in rental property inspections
By Brendan Grehan
OVER 300 private rented properties failed inspections under the Housing (Standards for Rented Houses) Regulations 2019.
At last week’s monthly meeting of South Dublin County Council, Councillor Dermot Looney asked the Chief Executive “to provide a year-on-year report of private rented tenancy inspections up to 2019, to note in the report the percentage of passes and failures in the reports, and to provide details on the nature of such failures”.
Many properties fail due to updating of regulations
The Council replied that from January to March 2019, there were 345 inspections with 313 failures, a failure rate of 91 per cent.
In 2018, there were 1,891 inspections and 1,697 failures, a failure rate of 90 per cent. A year earlier there were 1,362 inspections with 1,135 failures, a failure rate of 83 per cent. In 2016, there were 1,353 inspections with 1,195 failures, a failure rate of 88 per cent.
Finally in 2015, there were 1,731 inspections with 1,081 failures, a failure rate of 62 per cent.
The Council added: “It is the experience of the Council’s inspectors that a large amount of cases fail due to relatively minor, easily remedied contraventions of the minimum housing standards legislation, e.g. no fire blanket in the kitchen, out-of-date or non-functioning smoke alarms, no microwave etc.”
The Council also said: “It has been also noted that properties frequently fail due to updating of regulations, e.g. requiring multiple carbon monoxide detectors (one is required at each point where fossil fuels are burned, and at each upper storey); and window restrictors (required for all openable windows 1,400mm above ground).”
