Show HN: Rental data supplied by tenants in Ireland, searchable by all (howmuchrent.com)
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.
92 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadIf 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.
Housing as an investment, combined with piss-poor government policy, have certainly not helped things though.
Doesn't Ireland have a similar saas service?
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.
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.
Honestly, as a software dev you are better off in the US because you're going to be on the winning side of that income inequality.
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.)
https://www.tenancy.govt.nz/rent-bond-and-bills/market-rent/
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So usually what happens is you move over on an H-1B but those are subject to an annual cap for which you only have a 1/4 chance of being selected unless you work for a cap-exempt non-profit employer.
Employers will usually sponsor a green card after you start working for them.
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/...
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
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.)
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).
Readers: earlier comments are in response to that other link so you might want to look at both.
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.
We shut our borders suddenly and unexpectedly for two years, going from a long-run rate of over 1% net immigration to negative overnight. Meanwhile, we kept development approval and construction going largely unperturbed.
Our housing market responded with a two year long bull-run.
As convenient as it is to blame immigrants, I don't think it's true.
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.
Having kids generally increases the amount of sqft you desire and can live with.
In my corner of the world it got to a point where things like blocks of just studio apartments are built, which were all bought out back when the project was still a hole in the ground.
It's most pronounced in China, where over 70% of household wealth is in real estate, because everyone and their grandmother is investing.
https://gaffologist.com/
Do you offer historical exports of data? I’d love to create some visualisations of the housing situation in Ireland over time.
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 ?
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?
Latest Firefox, latest macOS.
Header: Consider refining the top nav. Placing the title/logo to the left and the notification icon alongside buttons on the top-right creates a sense of spatial balance. Shrinking the search field and centering it would not only economize space but also mitigate the initial impression that it's an intrusive advertisement.
Body: A slight reconfiguration can go a long way. Situate filters to the left and the map to the right to capitalize on users' muscle memory from interacting with similar interfaces. Use Inter (Google Fonts) for a cleaner look. If you want to avoid Google Fonts, just go with Verdana.
User Interaction: Your attempts to clarify map submissions suggest the current UX leaves room for improvement. A single, dedicated 'Submit Location' button leading to a streamlined modal or page can make the process more intuitive. It eliminates the need for repeated explanations scattered throughout the page.
Promotion: The 'Help Us Spread the Word' section risks being mistaken for an ad. Focus on optimizing the core experience; a compelling product naturally invites sharing.
Listing: Optimize space utilization in the list view. Presenting three cards side-by-side allows for easier scanning. Implementing a toggle for card and list views could be a user-friendly addition.
Overall, you've done commendable work. The key lies in fine-tuning the details to make the interface not just functional, but easier to use.
One feature that might be nice is being able to search by some metrics like square meters, number of room, bathrooms, etc and see aggregate stats on that. Median rent, high low etc.
As a more minor nit; It is also a bit annoying that the initial view doesn't show all of Ireland, and it is not possible to zoom out enough fit it.