In a shared house in Beaumont, renters faced mould, fees, and a forced exit

The email that Janiedson Santos got on 19 May gave him less than a month to leave the room he was renting on Beaumont Road in the northside of the city. 

“The owner of the apartment you are currently occupying is requesting its return,” says the email from Leevin Ireland, and “as a result you will need to vacate the property by 16/06/2025”.

Leevin Ireland later updated the date by which he had to leave to 19 June, making it a square month. 

But they still insisted that he leave within that timeframe as laid out in his contract, emails show. They wouldn’t be managing the property anymore, they said.

They offered to help him relocate to another Leevin property. “Your designated sales agent can offer you an alternative property,” the email says.

Santos said he spoke to them about that. They told him they didn’t have any single rooms to move into, he says.

Santos’ position is that he shouldn’t have had to move out at all – especially after he filed a case with the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB) to challenge the validity of the notice. 

That froze the situation until the dispute had been heard, he said, referring to the law as relayed to him by the RTB.

But workers came in, and renovations started around him. His access to the property would soon be cut off, he was warned in another email from Leevin Ireland. So he felt forced to move out, Santos said recently.

In the midst of all the back and forth with Leevin Ireland over his right to stay, Santos rang his family, he said. “I started to cry, and my family told me to come back to Brazil, you don’t have to go through that.”

He felt as if he was being treated like an animal, he said. 

On Monday 11 August, the two upstairs windows were open at the house, just opposite the entrance to Beaumont Hospital. There were seven wheelie bins in the concrete driveway, and a few rubbish bags placed neatly.

A new round of tenants have already moved in.

Eduardo Gonzaga, a director and co-founder of Leevin Ireland, said that the landlord hadn’t been happy with the state of the property, which hadn’t been looked after well by some of the renters, and had wanted it back. 

So they had to give renters notice, he says.

That plan later changed to a refurbishment and reletting, said Gonzaga, but they didn’t know how long that was going to take.

And, the relationship with Santos had broken down, he said. “I think that there is no commercial relationship anymore, at that time as well.”

Central to the disputes between Leevin Ireland and some of those who were living in the shared house on Beaumont Road is what status they had as renters: were they tenants? Or were they licencees, with fewer rights than tenants?

As housing models proliferate, it is a question being posed by renters in different situations across Ireland, from retirement villages, to co-living, to apartments in Rathmines. 

For its part, Leevin Group’s Gonzaga says that the company – which rents and sublets 400 properties to renters on licences across Dublin and Cork – is meeting a need in the market, that of international students coming with no references, who need a decent and affordable place to land.

The root of it

For Santos and other renters who lived in the house on Beaumont Road, the rather abrupt notice to leave was one of several indignities that they say they felt while living there.

They complained too about mould and the time it took for maintenance, threats of fines for issues that they argued were outside their control, and the fairness of docked deposits at the end of their stay.

Routes for resolving those disputes vary between tenants, who can turn to the RTB, and for licences, who could try the Small Claims Court. 

Gonzaga says that the company’s position is that all those who rent from them are licencees rather than tenants. They clearly said that to Santos, he said, and it’s laid out in the contracts that they sign. 

It’s important for people to understand what motivated Leevin Ireland and the accommodation it offers, he said, and how it sits within the existing rental market. 

The company rents and sublets more than 400 shared rentals across Dublin and Cork, he said, including the house at Beaumont Road.

When Gonzaga co-founded the company in 2018, he was motivated by the limited housing options for international students coming to study at language schools in Ireland, he says.

“They have options of a host family when they arrive or a hostel,” he said. Neither fit the purpose, says Gonzaga.

Leevin Ireland started to work directly with language schools and agencies offering accommodation to rent by the week, he said. They rented houses, and serviced them, he says.

“But the customers that were staying with us, when they were leaving after two, three, four weeks’ accommodation, they were getting scammed,” he says. 

He saw that international students renting elsewhere were being forced to pay in cash, being kicked out with no notice at all, or having to sign up for 12-month leases and paying for months that they were never going to use, he says.

People were asking them for slightly longer-term accommodation from Leevin Ireland, he says, so they worked to provide that.

Leevin Ireland has tried to formalise and improve what was already happening with shared houses, he said, and to provide a good and affordable service. 

It does that, Gonzaga said. “We have more than 2,000 clients every year. We don’t have 2,000 problems, you know?” 

Giving licences means that the renters – who are often strangers and may be staying for different lengths of time – aren’t jointly responsible for the rent for the whole property, as they would be as tenants, he says.

It fits the needs of students, he says. “If two friends rent a room, they have a room to look after, not for a whole house.”

International students also don’t have references here in Ireland, he says, and so this is a way for them to get flexible accommodation with a contract, without those.

Santos, though, who lived at the Leevin-let property on Beaumont Road, says he doesn’t see any advantage for renters in being licencees rather than tenants but sees several disadvantages – such as no rent controls and weaker security of tenure. 

Renters from Leevin Ireland also do have some joint responsibilities with others in the house, which can lead to conflict. For example, Leevin Ireland can treat those who live in the same property as jointly responsible for cleaning, and for making sure all meet certain house rules.

Pedro Vendramini, who also used to rent in the house in Beaumont Road, said that he and others there at the time were threatened with a collective fine. 

In November 2024, all of the renters in the house were told by Leevin Ireland that they would be charged a €100 penalty fee, because they suspected someone in the house of subletting, an email shows.

Vendramini says they didn’t have to pay that in the end. 

Gonzaga says that it is challenging to manage shared homes, with diverse renters and conflicts over different standards of cleanliness, cooking habits, and cultural differences. 

If they inspect something and find something not up to standard, they tell the renters, they said. 

“They have the option and the right to tell us what is happening,” he said. Then, “we can deal with the person”.

“But if nobody comes up front and solves the problem with us, then we have no option but to deal with it as a matter of a group,” he says.

Why evicted?

The email in mid-May from “Customer Experience” at Leevin Ireland giving notice to Santos and his housemates said that the property owner wanted the house back. 

The property “will no longer be managed by Leevin Ireland, as it has been requested back by the owner. For this reason, all residents are required to vacate the premises by the end of the notice period”, another email reiterated on 28 May.

Santos asked more questions. 

On 9 June, Leevin Ireland gave another update. “This property is scheduled for renovation. We have even received complaints from yourself regarding maintenance issues, and we are now taking action to address them accordingly,” the email said.

Alba Fernandez said she thinks it was her actions that prompted the clear out. She thinks it was her push for better maintenance, she said, recently. 

Fernandez moved into the house in October 2024, she says, firstly into a room which fit four people in bunk-beds. She paid €395 a month, she says. In December, she moved to a single room for €665. 

Then, Fernandez had kind of bumbled along until her family came to visit her, she says. 

Her relatives took a look around and told her that her living conditions were absolutely not okay, she says. So, she had started to document and submit maintenance requests, she says.

In late December, she sent in two maintenance requests to Leevin Ireland in quick succession.

One showed images of her broken window, which she couldn’t close. “It’s so urgent, it’s so cold,” she wrote. 

(Vendramini, who rented the room before her, had mentioned the broken window in an email to Leevin Ireland after he moved out, saying it had been like that when he got the room). 

It took a couple of weeks for Leevin Ireland to address the window, she says.

The second request had photos showing a spread of black mould along the ceiling in the bathroom, and up the walls and along the edges in her bedroom. “It’s so urgent, this conditions are so unhealthy,” she wrote.

Nobody came in to get rid of that, she says.

But on 6 March, Leevin Ireland wrote to her and others in the house. They had seven days to clean the housing, including the mould, or they would take action under house rules, the email said. 

Leevin Ireland’s house rules say that residents must clean the property, including all signs of mould on the walls. If they don’t, they will be charged penalty fees “to be decided by the Leevin team/inspection”. 

Fernandez turned to Dublin City Council. She emailed its environmental health section, which is tasked with inspecting private rental properties to see if they meet standards. 

She had reported the humidity early on, she told the council. “It’s been two and a half months since this and no one has responded to me yet.”

None of this treatment was acceptable, said Fernandez.

On 26 March, she filed yet another maintenance request with Leevin Ireland. “The fire alarm has been ringing non-stop for a month,” she wrote. It wasn’t wawa-ing non-stop, she said later, but beeping on and off as if a low battery. 

On 28 March, she filed a maintenance request, with images showing a broken washing machine, and a broken kitchen door.

On 7 April, a council environmental health inspector, Joanna Butler, came out. She listed 32 violations of minimum standards in her report, issued later that month.

There was mould on the kitchen walls, and the ceiling was stained. There was mould in the downstairs bathroom, on the grouting, ceiling, door frames. There was mould on the walls of the utility room, and on the walls of the downstairs hall and staircase, and landing. 

There was mould in the upstairs bathroom, on the grouting and door frame, and ceiling. There was mould on the ceiling of one of the upstairs bedrooms, and on the walls, and flaking paint on a wall and window sill. 

There was no adequate ventilation in a downstairs bedroom, with tape blocking a vent. 

She couldn’t get into the other three bedrooms to check them, her report said.

The dryer wasn’t in good condition. Fire alarm lights were red, which needed to be looked at. 

Gonzaga says that it might sometimes look from the outside as if Leevin Ireland isn’t working to get maintenance issues sorted. But internally, it is working on the fixes, and has a portal and responsive system and the company supports renters and has loads of examples of that, he said.

Often though, it can take time to get a plumber or an electrician out in Ireland, he said. “Sometimes, people expect standards from their countries.”

When his team got Fernandez’s note about the broken window, it was flagged as a priority to fix, he said, and someone had looked at it, found they needed to go to the landlord about it – and did that.

The fire alarm, reported on 26 March, was checked on 9 April, reported to the alarm company, and fixed on 7 May, he said, running through the records.

If there is mould, and it isn’t because of a leak, they advise renters on how to clean and ventilate, he says. If it is a structural issue, they get onto the landlord, he says.

Santos said that when he moved into the house at Beaumont Road in July 2024, there were nine people living there.

There were three single rooms, one double bedroom, and one with four people, he said. 

He first moved into the double room, he said. After a few months, he moved to a single room, paying €665 a month. 

If so many people are crammed into a house and are washing and cooking, is that not going to create issues with mould?

Leevin Ireland didn’t create the market whereby eight or nine students have to live together in a house for it to be affordable, says Gonzaga. “This is how the market was before us. What we tried to do is make it, like, organised.”

International students wouldn’t be able to afford to rent alone, he says. “It is not a reality in this market.”

The company could make more money if it packed in more students, he says, but they don’t do that and have their own internal rules. 

Like, not more than four people for each fridge and a cap on how many can live in a house, he says. They would only put five people in a two-bed apartment, says Gonzaga, or sometimes six people if there are two bathrooms.

Inadequate ventilating, and not using the heating properly, leads to mould, he says. “There are many reasons for this to happen. There is ways to avoid it.”

They have houses where mould and cleanliness isn’t an issue, he says. “We have houses with eight people that are spotless.”

When the council’s environmental health officer sent out its improvement notice, saying it had to deal with the issues it had listed, they sent it to the property owner, Independent Trustee Company Limited. 

A spokesperson for Independent Trustee Company Limited said that the property is held in a pension trust administered by the company on behalf of a pension scheme member.

In March 2025, members chose a property manager for this and other properties, they said. They honoured a lease that was in place with Leevin Ireland already. 

The renovation works over the summer were arranged by the property manager with Leevin Ireland, they said. “Responsibility for day-to-day property management, including compliance with rental regulations and liaison with tenants or licensees, rests with the appointed property manager.”

Turning to the RTB

After Santos got the email giving him 30 days to get out, he started to look more into the laws around renting, he says. He first turned to Chat GPT, he says. That directed him to the housing charity Threshold, where he sought advice. 

Based on all that, Santos says he thinks he is a tenant rather than a licensee.

His reasons? He had a room to himself (so, exclusive possession), he paid a fixed monthly rent, it was for a fixed term and renewable, the landlord didn’t live there, and he was responsible for upkeep of the property, he says.

How the RTB will rule in his case is uncertain, because the particulars of cases are so important. RTB tribunal reports show that members of tribunals have interpreted the law – and the characteristics of exclusive occupation – slightly differently, even for renters living in the same shared house.

The RTB’s disputes database lists two cases involving Leevin Ireland so far this year. In one, a tribunal decided the renters were tenants, and in the other that they were licencees and it had no jurisdiction.

Still, Santos opened a dispute with the RTB on 24 May. 

And, on 9 June, he asked the RTB for advice on whether he had to leave the house, as Leevin Ireland was insisting he had to leave on 19 June, he said.

“I kindly ask for your guidance on how to proceed, as I believe that the check-out should not take place until the RTB has issued a formal decision on the matter,” he wrote.

The RTB replied: “the order by your agent to vacate any notice of termination that is currently being disputed with the RTB is on hold till the RTB process is complete,” the email said. “This is not a suggestion this is legal legislation.”

He told Leevin Ireland that in an email, and they went back and forward.

On 19 June at 2.41pm, Santos got an email from Leevin Ireland telling him that they had carried out a check-out inspection. They could see that he hadn’t left, they said.

They had removed his electric bike, they said, as it had been charging inside which was against house rules and a fire hazard. 

They asked him to go to the head office, drop off his keys, collect his bike, and pack up his belongings and remove them.

He had until 11am the following day, the email said. “Please be advised that your access to the property will soon be revoked, and any remaining personal belongings may be considered abandoned and disposed of accordingly, in line with the Licence Agreement.”

When Santos got home that evening, he sent pictures of what the house looked like to the RTB. 

There were people at work, ladders propped up, the bathroom floor was covered in flakes of white, photos show. Workers had started to scrape the mould and paint off the walls, he says.

As well as removing his bike, they had removed the lock from his bedroom door, he said.

“I feel completely humiliated by the situation, I opened the process, followed all the legal procedures, I didn't delay the rent,” he wrote in an email to the RTB on 19 June.

On 20 June, he emailed the RTB again. “I am writing to inform you that I have been forced to leave the accommodation managed by Leevin due to ongoing construction works that have made the property uninhabitable.”

He had wanted to stay until the dispute was sorted, he wrote. But “the environment has become unsafe and unsuitable for living, with noise, dust, and the removal of essential facilities”.

On 23 June, an RTB officer got back. An illegal eviction may occur where a landlord denies a tenant access to a dwelling, or removes belongings, she said. 

“Please call us on the number below and one of my colleagues will fill out an illegal eviction report over the call with you,” she said.

There would then be a process to determine whether this was an illegal eviction or not.

Santos didn’t want to call, he says, as he isn’t confident over the phone in English. “You can’t go in in person, just a phone call or an email.”

When Santos filed his first dispute on 24 May, to challenge the notice to quit, he had been put in a queue for mediation, show emails. 

He asked to be upgraded straight to an adjudication in an email on 4 July, and was told a case officer had been notified. He is still waiting for a hearing, he says.

Santos warned Leevin Ireland that they faced fines of up to €20,000 for forcing him out, if he was found to be a tenant and those actions and emails were ruled to be an illegal eviction. 

Gonzaga said that he spoke on the phone to someone at the RTB, and they never told them that they were doing anything wrong, or that the situation was frozen while a dispute was pending.

When maintenance workers went in to paint and clean, it seemed that the property was empty, he said. Santos’ room was locked, and when they got in and saw belongings, they made sure not to take what was there, he says.

A spokesperson for the RTB says that if an adjudication or tribunal hearing finds that no tenancy existed, the RTB has no jurisdiction to award damages through its powers under the Residential Tenancies Act.   

In other words, if the RTB panel decides that Santos isn’t a tenant, then there would be no wrongdoing or fine, even if he had felt forced to leave while the dispute was pending.  

Levies and deposits

For Fernandez, the most upsetting issue isn’t that they were kicked out, she says. But that Leevin Ireland didn’t give her back all of her deposit, she says. 

Leevin Ireland told Fernandez that it was keeping €440 for cleaning and maintenance, an email said.

Fernandez wrote back to say that she had repeatedly reported maintenance issues with the house, from soon after she moved in. She had taken photos and a video showing the beautiful condition that she had left the common areas, her bedroom and the kitchen, she said. 

Other people were still living there, she said. “I’m not responsible for how they left their part of the house.”

She was meticulous in cataloguing the cleaning that she did when she left the house – a week or so earlier than the end of the contract and some of the others, she says. “I left everything in perfect condition.”

Leevin Ireland sent back pictures of dirty fridges and the oven, mould, and full bins, as well as belongings all over the place, from their inspection. The property wasn’t left in a satisfactory condition, they said. “It is the responsibility of all customers to ensure that the property is kept clean and organized.”

Gonzaga says that it is important to remember that the inspections done by Leevin Ireland in the run-up to the renovations found the property in a terrible condition already. 

That, he said, was because of a lack of cleaning and taking care of it by some renters. 

But he would review Fernandez’s case, he said, last Thursday. Fernandez said on Tuesday that she hadn’t yet heard anything more from Leevin Ireland, either way.

Santos says that not getting all of his deposit back was an issue for him, too.

Leevin Ireland told Santos that it was keeping €440 as a cleaning and maintenance fee, €30 as a fine for failing to return the keys, and €22.16 a day for three days for overstaying. So, he would get €113.50 back from his €650 deposit, an email said. And, €66.50 to refund days that he had overpaid of the rent. 

Santos wrote back to dispute that. 

There were no receipts justifying the cleaning fee, and look at photos of how workers had left the property right before he moved, he said. 

The key and three-day charge was also unfair, he said. “There was an illegal eviction, still under review by the RTB.”

Santos says that he had to borrow money from his brother to pay a deposit on a new place to stay. He hasn’t been able to pay him back yet, he says.

Fernandez was lucky as she moved in with her boyfriend so didn’t need it back for a deposit for a new place, she says. But she still has filed a dispute with the RTB, she says, because it’s her money. 

Santos said he was so sure about the RTB when he opened the process. But he has sent so many things – and is still waiting on anything to happen, he says.

In other jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom, there are specific laws, rules, and planning regulations, that cover what are called “houses in multiple occupation” – where renters from different households share a property.

But there isn’t in Ireland. 

And in responses to queries about licences, a spokesperson for the Department of Housing focused on the use of licences for “digs” accommodation – where renters live in a property with a landlord – rather than houses of multiple occupation.

Traditionally, rent-a-room arrangements are used by students and others living in “digs” or family homes, they said. They are formalised in licence agreements, they said. 

Such accommodation is “an integral housing solution for students and other renters as well as an important source of revenue and, in some circumstances, social interaction for homeowners”, they said. 

“Any attempt at regulating ‘digs’ or licence arrangements could well impact negatively on the supply of this traditional and important source of accommodation for students and others,” said the spokesperson. 

The Residential Tenancies Act lays out what is a tenancy and what is a licence, they said. “There are no plans at this time to alter this position.”