The average price of renting a home in Donegal has risen by 8.9% in the past year.
The average monthly rent in the county now stands at €638, according to the latest Daft.ie report.
This is more than half the average rent across Ireland, which has increased by 4.5% in the past year to €1,391.
Donegal continues to have some of the lowest rent prices in the country.
Leitrim had the lowest average in the second quarter of 2019 at €608 per month, followed by Donegal.
The availability of rental homes in Ulster and Connacht has improved slightly, the report said. There were 520 homes available to rent in Connacht and Ulster on August 1 2019.
Nationally, the study found that Ireland has just 2,700 homes available to rent nationwide, the lowest number on record since 2006.
The shortage of rental accommodation is creating a crisis for students this September, according to Pierre Yimbog, President of the Technological University Dublin Students’ Union.
There are currently 75,500 students living in Dublin, but the number of spaces in student and University accommodation amounts to under 14,000.
Yimbog said that a worrying trend is the rise in reports of homeless students who have ended up ‘couch surfing’ or, in extreme cases, sleeping in cars. With Brexit, he said that there has been a 18.5% drop in Irish students applying for universities in the UK and are instead choosing to study at home.
Yimbog said: “We need enough AFFORDABLE units to drive up supply that will in turn drive down demand and costs so that the only stress one associates with university is a healthy amount of exam nerves – not where to find or how to afford a space to live.”
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