Irish Residential Properties REIT Limited
Also known as: Irish Residential Properties Limited; IRES Fund Management; Irish Residential Properties (Orion) Limited; Irish Residential Properties (Tara View) Limited.
Linked to 21 companies
IRES REIT is a Real Estate Investment Trust which describes itself as ‘the leading provider of quality private residential rental accommodation in Ireland with almost 4,000 homes in communities across Dublin and Cork’.
The company is listed on the Euronext Dublin Stock Exchange and reported revenue of €87.9 million in its most recent Annual Report. IRES is one of four Real Estate Investment Trusts (or REITs) established in Ireland following the introduction of REIT status in 2013. The Department of Finance has noted that IRES is the only REIT that remained operating in Ireland as of 2022.
Euronext Dublin Stock Exchange
The role of the REIT and IREF regimes in the Irish property market - Department of Finance
Company registration records show that Irish Residential Properties Ltd (IRES) was founded in 2014 by CAPREIT Acquisitions, a branch of the Canadian Apartment Properties REIT (CAPREIT). CAPREIT’s company website describes CAPREIT as ‘Canada’s largest publicly traded provider of quality rental housing’, which is ‘driven by a remarkable history of caring, starting in 1997, [through which] we’ve never stopped growing’.
IRES company registration records - CORE
The Irish Times reported that IRES Reit raised €200 million from its launch on the Dublin stock market in April 2014, with investment from CAPREIT, Irish Life Assurance, and two US-based investment funds reportedly backing the company’s prospectus, in which IRES described itself as reviewing properties, with up to 2,300 apartments identified as being suitable for purchase.
Property trusts Ires Reit eyes 2,300 apartments - Irish Times (archive version)
By 2016, IRES’s role and investment in acquiring apartments in bulk from the National Asset Management Agency and Irish banks led to its identification in the Irish Times as ‘one of the country’s largest landlords’, alongside other institutional investors like Kennedy Wilson. Then CEO of IRES REIT described this post-crash period of investment and acquisition as involving ‘a great market’, noting in an Irish Times interview that ‘we’ve never seen rental increases like this in any jurisdiction that we’re aware of… I truly feel bad for the Irish people’.
Meet the landlords buying in bulk and changing the market - Irish Times (archive version)
Ireland’s biggest landlord: ‘I feel bad for the Irish people’ - Irish Times (archive version)
Per the company’s most recent Annual Report, IRES owns 3,684 units in Dublin and 50 in Cork. IRES reports that almost a third (30%) of these units are located in South Dublin, with an average apartment age of 14.9 years and an average monthly rent €1,774 across its portfolio. The 2023 Annual Report shows that company has a particular concentration of units in Sandyford (213 units in Beacon South Quarter, 189 units in Rockbrook South Central, and further holdings in Time Place, Grande Central, Rockbrooke Grande Central, and The Maple developments), Tallaght Cross West (460 units), Charlestown (235 units), and Landsdowne Gate (224 units).
Researchers writing for Rundale have noted that this concentration of ownership in specific areas is especially problematic, and have argued in favour of breaking the grip of corporate landlordism and more targeted regulation of corporate landlords.
Breaking the grip of landlordism - Rundale
Size matters – the case for regulating corporate landlords - Rundale
The Dublin Inquirer has reported that in 2023 IRES issued notices of termination of tenancy to 5% of its tenants. The RTB has found that some notices of termination of tenancy and rent review issued by IRES have been invalid, and also found against the company in a specific case involving the calculation of arrears where a parking charge had been added to the tenants’ rent in an apartment in Baker’s Yard.
The research for the CATU eviction database project has shown that IRES has the dubious honour of having had the most evictions approved by the RTB of any landlord in Ireland, with 128 since 2015. This only covers cases where tenants have fought the eviction notice through the RTB so is only a small proportion of the total.
As reported in academic research on corporate landlords, IRES were involved in over 250 RTB cases between 2015 and 2022, and the vast majority of these cases were instigated by the company, often in pursuit of rent arrears. Many of the company’s cases at the RTB have involved disputes around market rent and rent increases.
The company is often recorded in RTB documents making use of its ownership of overall apartment developments to support rent increases for individual apartments within the development. In a 2016 RTB case, the company’s agent justified a 23.4% rent increase by arguing that ‘his company managed 235 units on behalf of the landlord in that development and that they were well aware of the market rent that could be obtained for each type of unit under their management’.
Report of Tribunal Reference No: TR0716-001856 / Case Ref No: 0516-26557 - RTB
Another 2016 RTB case involving a tenancy in the same development shows that IRES sought to increase rents quickly and steeply, following its acquisition of the development in October 2014. The tenants in question had been paying €950 in January 2012, which had gone up to €1,175 by January 2015, and IRES unsuccessfully tried to increase this again by over 20% that November.
Report of Tribunal Reference No: TR0216-001612 / Case Ref No: 1215-22995 - RTB
Overall, the case of IRES demonstrates that facilitating the entry of large-scale investors into the housing market so they can gobble up available supply and manipulate their disproportionate market share translates, unsurprisingly, into mass evictions and unaffordable rent increases.