Dayo Ade Olusola|M10news|19 February 2026
The number of landlords providing rented homes in Ireland fell steadily throughout 2025. For tenants, understanding why matters more than the headline figure.
The Short Answer: Thousands, and the Exit Is Accelerating
Figures from the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB) show that 103,774 landlords were associated with registered private tenancies nationally by Q3 2025. That represents a 0.5% decline year-on-year and a further 0.3% fall on the previous quarter.
While the percentages appear small, they translate into thousands of individual landlords leaving the market and with them, thousands of homes.
In Dublin, the picture is more nuanced. Registered tenancies in the capital increased by 4.3% year-on-year to 108,174. However, the rise in tenancy numbers masks a fundamental shift in who is providing those homes a change with significant consequences for affordability and availability.
Who Is Actually Leaving the Market
Those exiting are overwhelmingly small, individual landlords, not large property companies.
Typically, they are owners of one or two properties who entered the rental market during the Celtic Tiger era, endured prolonged periods of negative equity after the financial crash, and are now selling as rising house prices restore their equity.
The average Irish landlord is approximately 60 years old. For many, renting was never intended as a long-term business model. It was a necessity, held through difficult years, and is now being unwound as retirement approaches and regulatory obligations increase.
This demographic reality is central to understanding the exodus. The departure of small landlords is not primarily driven by short-term profit or opportunism, but by age, circumstance, and a rational response to a sector that has become harder to sustain at small scale.
Termination Notices Tell the Real Story
The clearest indicator of landlord exits is the sharp rise in Notices of Termination citing an intention to sell a legal requirement before a tenanted property can be placed on the market.
RTB data shows a consistent and accelerating increase:
- Q4 2024: 2,027 sale-related termination notices
- Q1 2025: 2,518 notices
- Q2 2025: 2,698 notices
- Q3 2025: 3,307 notices
In Q3 2025 alone, the RTB received 5,405 termination notices a 35% increase on the same quarter in 2024. Of these, 61% were linked to property sales.
The steady quarter-on-quarter rise suggests a structural shift rather than a temporary spike.
Why March 2026 Became the Pressure Point
A key catalyst was legislation that came into force on 1 March 2026, requiring landlords with three or fewer properties to provide minimum six-year tenancies.
During that six-year period, selling a property is permitted only in limited circumstances, such as verified financial hardship or a genuine family need.
For landlords already contemplating an exit, the choice was stark: sell before the deadline with vacant possession, or remain locked into the sector under tighter rules for at least another full tenancy cycle.
The Housing Minister James Browne defended the reforms as necessary to strengthen tenant security and stabilised rents over time, while also acknowledging that research conducted in 2023 showed more than a quarter of small landlords already planned to exit the market within five years.
That distinction matters. It suggests the departures are driven by a combination of demographic reality and regulatory pressure not legislation alone. Reversing the reforms would not necessarily bring those landlords back, but the timing may have compressed exits into a shorter window than the market can easily absorb.
What the Rent Data Actually Shows
The growing role of institutional landlords in Dublin has softened the immediate impact of small landlord exits in the capital, where they now provide around one in four tenancies. Overall tenancy numbers continue to rise.
However, institutional landlords are not a like-for-like replacement. According to the RTB/ESRI Rent Index for Q2 2025 the most authoritative measure of actual rents paid under registered tenancies in Ireland the picture nationally is as follows:
- The standardised average rent for new tenancies grew by 4.7% annually to €1,731 per month
- The standardised average rent for existing tenancies grew by 4.8% annually to €1,482 per month
- Sitting tenants are paying on average €248 less per month than new tenants — a gap of 16.7%
- The rate of new tenancy rent inflation has moderated, falling from 5.5% in the previous two quarters to 4.7% in Q2 2025
It is important to note that these are national standardised averages across all property types. Dublin rents are considerably higher. According to the RTB/ESRI Rent Index for Q4 2024, the standardised average rent for new tenancies in Dublin specifically stood at €2,177 per month, with existing tenancies at €1,865 per month.
This gap between what new and sitting tenants pay is directly relevant to the landlord exodus story. When a small landlord sells, the incoming tenant whether in a sold property or displaced into the rental market faces new tenancy pricing, not the lower rents that long-term tenants had been paying.
The modest houses and older apartments traditionally supplied by small landlords often at lower price points and in established communities are disappearing as those properties are sold into the owner-occupier market. Institutional portfolios, concentrated in newer apartment developments, do not fill that gap.
Outside Dublin: A Quieter but More Severe Crisis
Outside the capital, the consequences of the small landlord exodus are more severe. Institutional landlords account for just 3.5% of tenancies nationally, compared with roughly 27% in Dublin.
As small landlords exit provincial towns and regional cities, there is often no large-scale replacement leading to a quiet but persistent contraction in rental supply that receives far less media attention than the Dublin market.
What Tenants Should Understand
The landlords leaving the rental market in 2025 are not, in most cases, the caricature of exploitative property owners. Many have provided long-term homes for decades and are now making a rational decision to exit while conditions allow.
That does not diminish the real hardship caused by tenancy terminations, nor does it excuse improper practices where they occur. RTB data shows disputes remain widespread. But understanding the human and structural drivers behind the exodus is essential if policy responses are to be effective.
Measures that make small-scale renting viable such as targeted tax reliefs, faster dispute resolution, or proportionate regulation — may do more to preserve affordable rental supply than policies focused solely on restricting exits.
For tenants, particularly those on lower incomes or outside Dublin, the loss of small landlords represents the disappearance of a segment of the market that served them specifically. What replaces that supply, and whether it is affordable, is likely to define Ireland’s housing debate in the years ahead.
Sources: RTB/ESRI Rent Index Q2 2025; RTB/ESRI Rent Index Q4 2024; Residential Tenancies Board quarterly tenancy and termination notice data Q3 2025.
