While a lot of the budget speech was taken up by the housing crisis and a number of important measures have been introduced, none of these will help the rental market in the short term. Tenants are worried about increasing rents and below par accommodation and landlords are getting out of the business by the bucket load due to high tax rates and very little support from the RTB. Unfortunately for tenants there was nothing in this budget and for landlords the only measure introduced was that full interest relief is being allowed for loans to purchase or improve rental accommodation. This was to be at 85% from 1 January 2019 and has now changed to 100%. On its own I don’t think its enough for landlords and I expect landlords to continue getting out of the business with institutional landlords taking over. This will probably be a concern for tenants. We were expecting more policies to entice landlords into the market, and these may have been linked to long term tenancy’s however nothing came of this.