About Shelter
Most landlord-tenant disputes in Ireland end the same way. The tenant stops paying. The landlord serves notice. The notice is contested. The case crawls toward an RTB tribunal that may take 14 months. By the time the determination lands, the arrears figure is into five digits and the property has been off-market for over a year. Shelter exists because that pattern is now the default, and nobody has built a productised service to break it.
Shelter is Ireland's first Tenant Exit Specialist — an advisory and project-management service for landlords with overholding tenants, rent arrears, anti-social tenancies, or any combination of the above. We project-manage the operational work of getting the tenant out and the money back. We do this end-to-end, with one human as your single point of contact, and we charge a fixed fee for each productised pack.
We are not a solicitor's firm. We are not a charity. We are not a debt collector. We work with all three — you'll meet our partner solicitor on cases that need litigation, our partner PSA-licensed Private Investigator on cases that need surveillance, and our partner debt collector when arrears recovery moves to commercial pressure. But the relationship sits with Shelter, the price is fixed up front, and the coordination is ours.
To get this out of the way, because the brand confuses people:
Three flat-fee productised packs. Pick the one that fits the case.
A third-party negotiator approaches the tenant on the landlord's behalf and brokers a structured deed-of-surrender exit. Cash incentive (typically €1,000–€5,000) paid by the landlord, deposit returned, neutral reference. Most cases close within 4–6 weeks. The fastest, cheapest path when it works — and it works more often than landlords expect.
When negotiation isn't on the table, this is the productised version of what a property-law solicitor would charge €5k–€10k for hourly. Properly drafted Notice of Termination, full evidence bundle (arrears ledger, photographs, communications log, served-notice proofs), written submissions, and advocacy at RTB adjudication or tribunal. Solicitor-quality work, fixed fee.
For cases where evidence is the bottleneck — anti-social behaviour, claimed-vs-actual occupation, tenant who has effectively moved out but won't surrender. Our PSA-licensed Private Investigator partner runs the surveillance under their licence; we project-manage and produce the polished evidence pack the landlord uses at adjudication. Currently available case-by-case rather than as a headlined pack — engaged when a case justifies it.
Each pack has a dedicated page with full scope, what's included, what isn't, and the public-record case studies that illustrate the work.
This part matters more than the marketing copy makes it look.
We don't change locks. We don't disconnect utilities. We don't move tenants' belongings. We don't make threats, direct or implied. We don't visit at unsociable hours. We don't arrive in numbers. We don't commit any act that could constitute harassment under section 10 of the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act 1997, criminal damage under the Criminal Damage Act 1991, or interference with peaceful occupation under the Residential Tenancies Act 2004.
Our engagement letter explicitly prohibits clients from instructing us to do, recommend, or facilitate any of the above. If a client asks for it, we refuse, document the refusal, and continue with the legal version of the work.
The Hoxha case (Afrim Hoxha, landlord at Fortlawn Drive Dublin 15, fined €34,800 in September 2025 for changing the locks during RTB proceedings — Irish Times, 11 Sept 2025) is the textbook example of why this line matters. Hoxha is now down €34,800, plus the legal costs, plus a "particularly egregious" finding on the public record that will follow him through any future tenancy. Cash-for-keys at €3,000 plus deposit return would have cost him €3,500 and resolved it in six weeks.
The discipline here is the brand. Without it, we're a story waiting to happen — and we don't intend to be the story.
Our negotiators are paid by results. The polite ones are very polite. The persistent ones are very persistent. Some are both. None are anything more than that — we operate on the right side of the line and we don't apologise for being good at it.
If you've been a landlord in Ireland in the past five years, you've heard two versions of the story.
Version one (the populist landlord lament): the system is rigged against you, every tenant is a future court case, the Baltics let landlords attach welfare payments and we should too. Most of this is folklore. Lithuania actually protects families with children from eviction more than Ireland does. The "they attach welfare in Eastern Europe" line is a myth — we can't find a single EU jurisdiction where private rent debt is recoverable against social welfare. If you make the populist claim and a journalist Googles it, you lose the argument.
Version two (the tenant-rights orthodoxy): every landlord is a slumlord-in-waiting and every assertion of contractual rights is a step toward illegal eviction. Also not the whole story. The Hoxha case is real and so is the €34,800 fine. And Eoghan O'Mahony has been waiting 17+ months for vacant possession of his Carlow property while a tenant who stopped paying in June 2024 continues to occupy it (Irish Times, 5 Feb 2026). Both things are true.
We sit between the two stories. The honest comparison — the one we use in our content — is Ireland vs the European jurisdictions where landlords genuinely do have stronger remedies. Germany's fristlose Kündigung lets a landlord terminate without notice when 2+ months' rent is owed, and German wage garnishment is available for civil rent debt. Switzerland's three-class termination notice system is structurally faster than Ireland's RTB-then-enforcement loop. Denmark's specialised Housing Court operates with a three-day cure period. Each of those is a working European model. None require attaching welfare to anyone.
That's the contrarian credo: we'll tell the truth in both directions, even when it costs us a populist talking point. We do this because in our business, receipts beat slogans every time.
Shelter is the work of a small Irish team drawn from property law, RTB advocacy, debt recovery, and licensed investigation. We don't yet name individuals on this page — partly because the work pulls in partners on a per-case basis (a property-law solicitor here, a PSA-licensed Private Investigator there, a debt collector when the case lands in commercial recovery), and partly because the brand is the proposition, not any one person. As the work generates client outcomes we can point to publicly, that calculus changes.
What we will say is that the people doing the operational work have spent the last decade either sitting on the wrong side of the table from Threshold's advisers, sitting on the right side of it for landlord clients, or working the back-office of arrears recovery for institutional credit. The people doing the document work are solicitors. The people negotiating with tenants have done it before. We're not making this up as we go.
If you want to know more before engaging, the consult is the place. We'll tell you who's on your specific case before you sign anything.
Press, partnerships, or speaking enquiries: press@shelter.ie.
Solicitor or PI partnership enquiries: partners@shelter.ie.
Everything else: the contact form, or hello@shelter.ie.
A 15-minute consult is free. We'll either tell you which pack fits, or send you to the right person.
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