When supply improves, prices fall back – that’s one of the baselines of economics. More demand has the opposite effect. And yet the latest Daft.ie Rental Report, covering the first quarter of 2026, presents what looks like a contradiction. On one hand, the national average for open-market rents rose by 4.4 per cent between January and March – the largest quarterly increase in a data series that stretches back to 2002. The quarterly increase even eclipses the surge in rents during 2022.  On the other hand, the number of homes available to rent on May 1 this year was, depending…

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