Vulture Complains About “Falling Returns” - Kick Them Out!

It is reported today that vulture landlord Home Club, owned by LRC, is looking to sell some of its rental properties in Ireland due to falling returns.  If it is true, we say “good riddance” and hope that they take their entire operation out of this country.

Who are the LRC group?

Research presented at the Trinity College Barrington Lecture in 2023 showed that they are a US-based equity fund with 2,000 rental properties in Ireland. The website of LRC group is a slick affair, with an automatically playing video projecting images of hipsters riding bikes, using phones, doing yoga and having fun in a shiny high-rise urban “ecosystem”.

They describe themselves as “experienced in generating attractive returns through optimised performance and dedication to social, economic, and environmental sustainability”. Their founder is Yehudi Barashi, an Israeli investor, their chairman is Nadav Zohar, an American Lawyer and one time sergeant in the Israeli Defence Forces.

They operate in Ireland through a number of shell companies, such as Jersia, and Xerxia. These entities seem to be resident in Cyprus or Luxemburg, a business strategy that may be based on “tax efficiency” - code for tax avoidance.

Further down the chain there is the dirty business of extracting rents from workers and evicting families for no reason and this is carried out by an entity called “Home Club”.

In 2023 it emerged that LRC group was evicting families across the Dublin area for no reason. According to the RTB, eighty-nine no-reason evictions were issued by the company in a nine month period up until June 2023. Many of these evictions were in Swords, and indeed, the company is still engaged in a campaign to put families onto the streets for no reason.

Tenants of this company living in Dorset street, North Frederick street, Usher’s island, Blanchardstown, Swords and elsewhere have been reaching out for help from tenant union CATU, from People Before Profit and from journalists willing to report their plight. 

The living conditions they report are light years away from the Instagram-style propaganda projected on LRC’s website. There is no “dedication to social economic and environmental sustainability”  - quite the opposite. Mould, broken appliances, RTB fining the landlord for breach of obligations, add-on payments for parking spaces and service charges to say nothing of the wave of cruel no-reason evictions were common complaints.

The company has been called out in the Dáil  - by Bríd Smith, Richard Boyd Barrett and Paul Murphy TDs – and in Fingal County Council where their eviction campaign against families in Swords was raised by multiple councillors working in conjunction with local housing activists including myself.

The news today is that LRC is looking to sell off some of its properties - They claim that “return on their investment is not good”. If it is true, we can only say “Good riddance”. Moreover, we hope that they fold up entirely. They are not welcome here.

If they are willing to sell, then some means need to be found to take the properties into public ownership.  If necessary, use compulsory purchase orders. If necessary, introduce emergency legislation.

Socialists aren’t constrained by the consitution but such actions are entirely consistent with article 43 of the current constitution which acknowledges that property rights ought to be regulated by the principles of social justice and that the State may pass laws limiting the right to private property in the interests of the common good.

The €160 million in tax relief given to private landlords that former ESRI economist Barra Roantree described as the “stupidest tax relief of recent times” could have bought a large proportion of LRC’s 2,000 plus properties.

You don’t have to be a socialist to see that this is just common sense.

We need to provide homes for working class families based on human need – not financial assets for billionaire corporations. However, LRC are only the most egregious example of the parasitism enabled by successive Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, Green and Labour governments.

The special tax arrangements such as the total exemption from profit tax for property investment funds introduced by the Fine Gael Labour government in 2015 alongside the €1 billion in rental supplements to landlords every year mean that corporate landlords give little back to society but take from our society, adding insult to injury.

Corporate landlords need to be banned and banished. Indeed, private landlordism is an inherently parasitic economic activity. As socialist thinker Karl Marx pointed out, the rentier class produces nothing, extracts value that is produced by others, the landlord is a:

“Sybarite excrescence, a parasite on capitalist production, the louse that sits upon him”.

Just to be clear – we’re not talking about your auntie who rents out her mother’s house down the road. We’re talking about the likes of John Moran, the mayor of Limerick who has €300,000 in rental income, the likes of Ronan Mullen, the slumlord who evicted multiple families from Tathony House, we’re talking about IRES REIT, Kennedy Wilson and we’re certainly talking about LRC group.

They need to go.

The properties won’t disappear. Show them the door, CPO the property of the vultures, CPO derelict homes and set up a state construction company that builds homes for all who need them.