[HN Gopher] Show HN: Rental data supplied by tenants in Ireland,...
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Show HN: Rental data supplied by tenants in Ireland, searchable by
all
I created https://www.howmuchrent.com last Friday to help bring
this kind of transparency to Ireland, allowing people to submit
their rents. Would love to get any HN feedback on the idea/website.
Author : vinnyglennon
Score : 81 points
Date : 2023-09-12 15:38 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.howmuchrent.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.howmuchrent.com)
| GenericDev wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and
| flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's
| not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. You may
| not owe rampant capitalistic behaviour better, but you owe this
| community better if you're participating in it.
|
| If you wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the
| intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
|
| Edit: actually, given
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37484857, I think we need
| to ban this account until we get some indication that you want
| to use the site as intended.
| [deleted]
| messe wrote:
| This overly simplifies things, especially in regards to
| Ireland's housing market, and ignores the fact that our
| construction sector is still yet to recover after the 2008
| crash.
|
| Housing as an investment, combined with piss-poor government
| policy, have certainly not helped things though.
| falcor84 wrote:
| This is about Ireland, but I'm curious whether there is any
| country in the world that does require this sort of transparency.
| tmnvix wrote:
| In NZ you can check market rents by area on the Tenancy
| Services website. These are broken down by property type and
| lower, medium, and upper values based on recent bond
| lodgements.
|
| https://www.tenancy.govt.nz/rent-bond-and-bills/market-rent/
| bdowling wrote:
| Not a country, but the City of Santa Monica, California, keeps
| a registry of rents for all rent-controlled units. Landlords
| are required to report an initial tenancy, which sets the
| starting rent. Each year after that, the City tells the
| landlord what the "Maximum Allowed Rent" is. All the documents
| relating to each property are publicly available and the city
| publishes an annual report.
|
| Not all cities with rent control keep such a registry. (e.g.,
| Los Angeles doesn't keep a registry, but does tell landlords
| the maximum they can raise the rent each year.)
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| You can get a rough idea of what similar rents are for an area
| by going to redfin or Zillow and setting your filter parameters
| accordingly.
|
| Doesn't Ireland have a similar saas service?
| anotherhue wrote:
| https://daft.ie/
| BlackjackCF wrote:
| Not that I'm aware of, though it would be nice.
|
| I get why though. I moved to Dublin from the US (from an
| expensive part of California) and I was shocked by the rent. It
| was more expensive than apartments I was paying for in the US,
| but Irish software wages are a fraction of what you'd get in
| the US.
| elictronic wrote:
| I am a little surprised by this. Are you sure you were
| comparing similiar styles and areas. Looking around online
| Dublin looks to be 26% cheaper than San Francisco. Rent for a
| single person is quite a bit lower and even rent for a family
| shows it to be lower but not by as much? I just glanced at
| https://livingcost.org/cost/dublin/san-francisco so not sure
| how accurate those style calculators are and is the cause of
| my questioning your statement.
| shevlinn wrote:
| The conditions of some properties in Dublin are abominable.
| My friend paid $1000 a month for a 70sq foot room with no
| windows or ventilation, in a 3 bed house with a single
| bathroom. Most new grad's going in to SWE from a top
| university in the country would be making on average 38k
| annual after tax.
|
| If you're irish, there's no point putting yourself through
| the misery of living in Dublin. You can just go live in
| London, or work remote and live anywhere in the EU.
| astrange wrote:
| Berkeley, CA has one. The rest of California doesn't yet, but
| there are some attempts to do it. Keyword is "rental registry".
| CalRobert wrote:
| For what it's worth, I've been crawling Daft (Ireland's main
| rental and buying site) for several years. If you click on a
| property you'll see nearby listing history for both rentals and
| purchases, including asking rents.
|
| https://gaffologist.com/
| adriancooney wrote:
| I love your site, I use it all the time and recommend it to all
| my friends. Thank you.
|
| Do you offer historical exports of data? I'd love to create
| some visualisations of the housing situation in Ireland over
| time.
| anotherhue wrote:
| This is magnificent, thank you.
| [deleted]
| mparnisari wrote:
| Hi OP! Question, it says "source: user / daft". What is 'daft'?
| Might want to add a info popup for non-Irish :)
|
| Also, the site says "Rental Data supplied by Tenant" but I see
| user: 3, daft: 453. So... it's not real tenant info right? Most
| of it comes from rental listings?
| anotherhue wrote:
| Not OP but it's a fairly dominant property search service in IE
| https://daft.ie/
| [deleted]
| Heloseaa wrote:
| Great work! This will actually be something very helpful to a lot
| of people!
|
| I am curious how you gathered so much user input in the short
| time this project has been alive ? Where did you prospect for
| more users to input ? and especially, how do you validate that
| the inputs are valid and not fake inputs and/or spams ?
| dang wrote:
| https://www.howmuchrent.com/ is a better post for HN than a
| political opinion piece like
| https://labour.ie/news/2023/06/28/why-is-the-government-so-a...
| so I've changed the URL from that.
|
| Readers: earlier comments are in response to that other link so
| you might want to look at both.
| [deleted]
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Make it global.
| metaphor wrote:
| Have you caught anyone attempting to poison the well yet?
| wiredfool wrote:
| Little bug -- Legend says Green is renting, blue is sharing, but
| the map and the popups on the map are the other way around.
| vinnyglennon wrote:
| Thank you. I added a legend to the map to make it clearer a few
| minutes ago, can't spot the error. If you still say the text
| error, let me know. Renamed "Share Your Rent" to "Add Your
| Rent" to avoid confusion too.
| wiredfool wrote:
| Sorry, it wasn't the legend, it was in the tag line. But it's
| gone now, so all good.
| vinnyglennon wrote:
| Awesome. Any more feedback on the website, please do let me
| know. Open to any suggestions, best way to improve.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| This might backfire.
|
| Large scale landlords and would be tenants are both pretty
| familiar with the market. The only people not familiar with the
| market are mom and pop landlords who tend to not update rent with
| changing market conditions. This increased transparency might
| cause them to raise rents because it'd be easier to do comps, and
| they wouldn't previously undercharging a tenant to make it harder
| to find a new tenant at a higher price.
| BlackjackCF wrote:
| I don't know how true this is anymore. Apps like Zillow,
| Apartments.com and the like make it very easy for even small-
| time landlords to figure out what the market is.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| I honestly think Zillow IS a market inefficiency. It's bad
| enough that it can't be relied on at local scales, yet
| ubiquitous enough that I think it pushes the market around a
| bit and has made prices stickier than they should be. It
| overvalues poorly maintained houses and probably undervalues
| well-maintained ones. Not sure how much it really helps with
| price discovery...
| seydor wrote:
| online shopping seems to have had the opposite effect
| richiebful1 wrote:
| It's not that hard to figure out what people are charging for a
| similar unit today, especially in a larger market where a high
| percentage of listings are online.
|
| Some mom and pop landlords (including myself) prioritize for
| having sustainable, enjoyable tenants. The gold standard is a
| tenant who requires little upkeep, pays on time, and stays for
| a long time. I won't increase the rent on tenants who are easy
| to work with.
|
| If a new prospective tenant asked why the price is going up,
| I'd explain that it's the going market rate, and they're
| welcome to find another place. I doubt transparency would
| change anything when listing prices are already public and
| rarely negotiable
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > mom and pop landlords
|
| If one was looking for such a landlord, what should they be
| looking for on the listing? Is there a common place where you
| might choose to list a rental that's not as frequently used
| by big players?
| orwin wrote:
| I found two in 10 years, so I might be an expert!
|
| Ask your friends and extended family about it. Especially
| if you're looking for single bedroom apartment. You never
| know, X's grandfather can have a small appartement he
| doesn't want to put on the market because it's a hassle, or
| your cousins' family (the other one) can have the perfect
| appartement for 2 people, 2 minutes from the sea, 5 from
| the train station, and you just have to wait a year for it.
| anotherhue wrote:
| [flagged]
| vinnyglennon wrote:
| Culver City, USA made an attempt at displaying Rents charged by
| landlords: https://medium.com/@hughfitzgerald/rents-charged-by-
| landlord...
| anotherhue wrote:
| I moved from Dublin to NYC. Yes the rents here are insane, but
| there are places to rent! There is often zero availability in
| Irish cities.
| gottorf wrote:
| Zero availability would indicate either severe supply shortages
| due to an inability to build (zoning/regulatory problems a la
| some municipalities in the US? Something else?) or a price
| ceiling on rent, leading to an inability for the market to
| clear (with the equilibrium price being above the legal
| ceiling). Do you know which applies?
|
| As an outsider, it would seem that Ireland has plenty of land
| on which to build, though the availability of building
| materials is another matter, and is something I can see Ireland
| being short on.
| pydry wrote:
| Property taxes are too low.
| astrange wrote:
| Ireland and the UK have the worst planning processes in the
| world leading to worse housing crises than even California.
| Having zoning would imply that it's legal to do something
| somewhere, which it basically isn't.
|
| In particular the Irish think their island is full of
| "nature" (when it's actually open fields because the British
| deforested all of it) and become ecofascists when you suggest
| any of it could be a building. (Or just regular ones since
| they think you'll want to put African immigrants in the
| building. Someone suggested this on Twitter last week and
| I've never seen so many replies afraid of "Somalis".)
|
| This is why more Irish live in America than in Ireland and
| the population is lower than it was in the 1800s.
| jnsie wrote:
| > This is why more Irish live in America than in Ireland
|
| This is nonsense. Are you telling me there are over 5
| million 1st generation Irish people living in America? Of
| course the number will be significanty greater if you
| include descendants
| astrange wrote:
| If you were born in Ireland then your grandchildren born
| in America are Irish citizens if they apply, aren't they?
|
| Anyway, Americans consider themselves
| Irish/Korean/Iranian/etc down to 2nd or 3rd generation
| even if the original countries don't. (In fact, all white
| Americans think they're Irish even if they aren't because
| it lets them drink in more bars. That's also how America
| stole all the credit for inventing Halloween.)
| messe wrote:
| > open fields because the British deforested all of it
|
| Ah here. It's unfair to solely blame the Brits for that. By
| the 1600s less than 20% of the island was forested, down
| from 80% at the start of the neolithic period[1].
|
| [1]: https://www.teagasc.ie/crops/forestry/advice/general-
| topics/...
| dboreham wrote:
| Not famine then?
| astrange wrote:
| That's been over for a while. They can't move back
| because there's nowhere to live.
| siftrics wrote:
| I've met thousands and I don't know a single Irish
| American that has expressed a serious desire to move
| back.
|
| Don't get me wrong; I'm an Irish American and I'd love to
| live in Ireland. But I was born and raised in the US and
| would have to abandon all my friends to move there.
| astrange wrote:
| Yeah, it is pretty hard. Mine actually moved back to the
| UK but we have more immediate family there than usual.
| (Except for me since the tech industry isn't as good.)
|
| Apparently Australia is actually the only country with
| net immigration from the US.
| messe wrote:
| > Apparently Australia is actually the only country with
| net immigration from the US.
|
| The E3 visas help with that. Otherwise as a tech worker
| you're generally stuck with either a H1B (which is a
| lottery) as a new hire, or L1B (which requires working
| for the company for a year) as an existing employee.
|
| Not all of the allocated E3 visa slots get used though,
| so IIRC, there's been continued discussions on Irish
| citizens being offered the remainder for the last few
| years, but nothing concrete yet.
| jajag wrote:
| In Ireland's case, both apply - there's an inability to build
| and there's defacto rent caps. Plus until very recently, an
| eviction ban.
| messe wrote:
| Yep, our construction sector still hasn't recovered since
| the crash. Combine that with some poor government policy,
| an increase in construction costs, as awkward planning
| rules (almost anybody can object to anything for almost any
| reason), and you have the shitshow we see today.
|
| I emigrated earlier in the year to Denmark, so while the
| actual pastures are less green, the rental prospects that
| are much nicer. It took me almost no time at all to find a
| rental close to my new commute (I prefer remote work, but
| in this case I'm dealing with actual hardware, and so
| physical presence is genuinely beneficial and often
| necessary--I can still work remotely when I need to if I
| have a delivery, appointment, or something I can't miss but
| not worth taking a whole day of leave over; and... this
| stream of thought comment is straying rapidly off topic, so
| I'll cut it off here).
| CalRobert wrote:
| Very hard to build, very hard to evict (you can be a horrible
| tenant for years and not get kicked out), very strict price
| controls (they carry over to the next renter), and lo and
| behold people decide being a landlord isn't worth the
| trouble. Property tax is low too so keeping places empty
| isn't as unappealing as elsewhere.
| gottorf wrote:
| Ah, the usual suspects, then.
| [deleted]
| Ecstatify wrote:
| The rent in Ireland is insane for the quality you get. My GF and
| I are currently living in my parents house. Collectively we earn
| ~EUR200K. New homes are in limited supply. Existing homes are
| poor quality but demand has increased the prices dramatically. We
| were looking at a new development and they increased the price by
| EUR80K. For a lot of people owning a home is becoming
| unrealistic.
| ericmcer wrote:
| This seems like a global phenomenon. What is happening? Is this
| related to globalization? It feels wrong to blame any countries
| internal policies when it seems to be happening in every
| country simultaneously.
| jk20 wrote:
| [dead]
| ovulator wrote:
| We added a billion people to the planet last decade.
| smeej wrote:
| The snarky part of me wants to comment that all those
| people are under 10, then, and should really be living in
| houses that were already otherwise occupied by older
| people, but I take your point.
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| The biggest factors end up being about political incentives,
| and it's not happening in every city and country in the
| developed world, the majority of them end up with some level
| of one key dynamic:
|
| People who already own property in an area tend to have
| relatively high political sway in that area, and have a
| vested interest in things that limit the new supply of
| housing. It may be explicitly because they want to keep the
| value of their property high, or because they want to "keep
| the character of the area" through things like limits on the
| number of floors new buildings can have, or open space
| requirements that require a certain amount of space be left
| open, or to limit multi-family dwellings.
|
| Ultimately even the property owners are also paying the
| increased cost of living that comes from these things, but
| the fact that they're not directly connected and take place
| in the future (i.e., you don't get an invoice for the next
| decade of increased rent prices when you vote for a proposal
| to require that apartments be limited to 4 stories) means
| that the vast majority of people don't consider them.
|
| People who don't yet own property are either people who
| already live in the area but who tend to have less sway than
| property owners (even assuming they know what policies to
| oppose), or people who are coming from outside the area and
| have had no prior influence on the politics there.
|
| How effective this dynamic is at stopping new housing
| construction in a particular area (often because of how its
| laws are structured, but also because of the policy choices
| pushed by its local politicians) is one of the primary
| determinants of how much rents and housing prices in an area
| will rise.
|
| On one end of the spectrum, you've got the Bay Area's huge
| number of patchwork municipalities, where interests are
| highly-entrenched, and where any meaningful reform would have
| to go through every individual municipality or come from the
| state level, and in which many of the politicians are
| themselves specifically anti-housing reform. On the other,
| you have more centralized city governments like Minneapolis
| with pro-reform politicians that can handle it at the city
| level (so there's only one war required to get meaningful
| reform). Minneapolis rents are actually decreasing because
| they passed housing reform. Often housing reform will merely
| stabilize rents (because prices also rise some due to
| inflation and economic growth increasing demand for land in
| the area, even if lots of housing is being built). Sometimes
| it can do enough to actually bring them down.
|
| In a sane world where property owners can't hijack the local
| government, you'd expect prices to rise some with economic
| growth and inflation, but significant increases in demand
| would spur building more housing and increased density. And
| increased prices due to mild inflation and economic growth
| are fine -- wages will generally increase to compensate for
| that (and some of the increase comes from nicer housing being
| built as the economy grows). Hopefully the housing reform
| movement will continue bringing us toward that saner world.
| asdefghyk wrote:
| re "....they want to "keep the character of the area"
| through things like limits on the number of floors new
| buildings can have, or open space requirements that require
| a certain amount of space be left open ......" People who
| do not own property also want this ( in my area - Australia
| )
| quacked wrote:
| The rate of immigration to developed countries far outpaces
| the rate of building new dwellings in developed countries.
| Net growth YoY for places like the US, Canada, UK, Australia
| all tell the same story. Several traditionally less-developed
| countries are also seeing the rural hinterlands drain and
| immense internal migration to urban areas.
| [deleted]
| CalRobert wrote:
| We did a new build and the planners were a bunch of fossils who
| were horrified by the idea we didn't want a mouldy pile of
| concrete blocks. After we built it, the neighbours marveled at
| how warm a timber home could be - and beautiful.
|
| We ended up moving to the Netherlands but remarkably there were
| so many homes for rent compared to Ireland it felt easy. I'm in
| a 5 bedroom house a 20 minute train ride from Amsterdam
| Centraal for about the price of a 4 bed semi-d in Tullamore.
| And I don't need a car here.
|
| Ireland's a mess.
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