One estate agency in Dublin says the Irish rental market is at the most difficult it has ever been.
It comes as the availability of homes on the market has continued to fall, with just 851 listed for rent on May 1st.
That is down from over 3,600 a year ago and is another all-time low for a research series that runs back to 2006.
The latest rent report from Daft also shows there were just 462 homes available in Dublin - by far the lowest on record.
Ryan O'Shaughnessy is an associate director of Get Property Estates.
He told The Hard Shoulder he recently got over 80 applications in 10 seconds.
"On Daft there's a facility where we can launch an advert, and straight away mark it 'Rent Agreed' so that it doesn't go out to the market for too long.
"The way it sets up you have to refresh it - so I refreshed, refreshed, refreshed - it went live, and then straight away I marked it 'Rent Agreed'.
"Probably about 10 or 15 seconds it was on the market, I got 87 e-mail applications in those 10 seconds.
"My colleague had one out in Blanchardstown, they left it up over the weekend.
"Launched on a Friday evening, on Monday morning there was 1,000 applications in his inbox.
"It's really, really difficult - and there's a human cost to that as well.
"We get about 15 people a day knocking on our door saying 'I can't find anywhere to live'".
'It was on the market for 10 to 15 seconds, and I got 87 applications.' Ryan O’Shaughnessy, of Get Property Estates, gives @kierancuddihy a taste of how crazy the rental market is right now. @TheHardShoulder pic.twitter.com/pb3yaNARph
— NewstalkFM (@NewstalkFM) May 12, 2022
'Most difficult market'
He says the market is suffering because of several factors.
"It's the most difficult market I think we've ever been in.
"There's just an absolute lack of supply, and because of that demand is going through the roof.
"Typically at this time of the year we'd have about 20 rental properties on the go at any one time - we currently have three, because people are not moving because there's just nowhere to move.
"We're finding that a huge amount of owners are leaving the market and because of that, that's supplies being strangled even further.
"We've a portfolio of about 725 rental properties, and we're getting up to two terminations a week - where owners are saying 'I'm getting out of the market'".
