LIMERICK city is now Ireland’s third most expensive city to rent in, according to the most recent Daft.ie report.
The average rent price for the last three months of 2023 stood at €1,907 according to the report, on par with Cork city, which also has an average rental price of €1,907.
The new figures show a 14 per cent increase on the same period in 2022.
Limerick and Cork cities were beaten only by Galway City, with an average rental price of €1,999, and Dublin with an average rental price of €2,384.
Rents in County Limerick also remained high, with the latest Daft.ie report putting the average county rent at €1,460 per month.
The increase in county rent prices showed a similar increase as the city, up 14.8 per cent on the same period in 2022.
The report also shows that renting a room across Munster was more expensive, up by an average of 14 per cent on the same time the year before.
There were 320 homes available to rent in Munster in quarter four of 2023, a slight increase of six per cent on the same period in 2022, but still only a third of the supply that was available between 2015 and 2019.
Nationally, rents rose by an average of 6.8 per cent throughout 2023, with a decline in rental inflation being experienced in Dublin.
In 2023, there was an average of 2.6 per cent increase in rents in the capital.
Professor Ronan Lyons, author of the Daft report, said that a lack of supply of new apartments is a leading factor in rising rent prices outside of Dublin.
Professor Lyons said that a “surge” of 20,000 new apartments built in Dublin between 2021 and 2023 were “more than three times the number of apartments built in the entire rest of the country in the same period”.
This, he said, “is what explains the slowdown in rental inflation in Dublin”.
“The need for new accommodation remains – and outside Dublin hasn’t been addressed at all. But all of the other factors are gone. Unless policy actions are taken to change course, over the next few years, the number of new rental homes built in Dublin will fall again, while it will remain close to zero elsewhere in the country.”
