JUST BEFORE THE government’s new rent rules came in, which made it harder for landlords to evict tenants and to raise prices, 25-year-old Éimhin Ward and his mates were served an eviction notice for their gaff in Dublin.
“The landlord said that she wanted to do the place up, and then that her nephew was moving in, and then that her daughter was coming back from England. Basically the full checklist of the things you’d say if you wanted to get people out. Whatever – at least she gave us 6 months’ notice,” Ward explained.
He has to move out by 13 June.
A County Laois native, his experience of renting in Dublin hasn’t exactly been smooth. Sitting in the office at KPMG (on his lunch break, he’s keen to stress), he was scrolling through Daft ads for studio apartments when he thought to ask a colleague to guess what the rent for one of them was.
“It was a tiny flat with a fold-out sofa-bed that was directly next to an oven door. I mean it seriously looked like you would be unable to open the oven. She said she’d pay €600. I said ‘nope, too low’. It was €1,400, and on an inner-city street in not the best area of town,” Ward said.
Therein an idea was born: would people be interested in playing a game where you guessed the rent for apartments advertised on Daft.ie?
A weekend of website design and a week of managing an active site later, and the Co Laois man had his answer: yes, the hordes of other renters in his position are very interested in dabbling in what he describes as cathartic “absurdism”.
In under two weeks, over 24,700 games have been played on his site, Dublin Rent Roulette, with over 83,000 guesses made. Impressively, players have been racking up an 85% win rate.
The punchline of the site becomes evident when your guesses for one-bedroom apartments (like one in Inchicore going for €2,350 per month) are so far off the mark that you feel stupid for starting so low – ‘guess again!’ the site prompts.
“Look, if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry,” is Ward’s philosophy on the whole thing.
“I wanted to highlight the point we’ve got to with the rental crisis, where it’s beyond belief,” he said.
He’s now facing moving back home until September, when some people he knows will be looking for a house.
“I’m not thrilled, but my mum is delighted,” he said.
Prior to finding the house he currently rents with his mates, he lived in digs run by a friend’s aunt in Dublin after graduating from college at University College Cork.
“Eileen was lovely, she was even washing our clothes, but eventually it was like: I’m in my 20s, I need to move out of here,” Ward said.
He experienced the highs and lows of room-hunting in Dublin for the first time.
“I wanted to live somewhere on my own, but I ended up queuing with 20 people to view a studio in Ranelagh that was beneath ground level, had half a window, and resembled a dungeon. The bed was once again in the kitchen, and still it was over €1,200, and way out of budget,” he said.
Ward added that hunting for a house share in the capital can often feel like looking for love online:
“I found myself actually putting on aftershave on the bus on the way to one viewing, and getting a text on the way back that said something like, ‘We’ve gone with someone else, it’s not going to work’.”
Ward is hoping that his game can fill some people in on the current state of the rental market who may not be in the unlucky position of needing a room right now.
“I’m losing like €20 a week on maintaining the site, and it got so much traction that I had to go home from work and update the servers one day, but I think it’s worth it to show people how out of reach the prices are – and these days it’s not just apartments, it’s rooms in shared houses that are going for €1,000 in Dublin. For most of us, it’s just not realistic,” he said.
According to the Daft.ie room rental report at the end of 2025, the average cost of a double room in a shared home was €775. That’s up 34% from pre-Covid levels and 77% above the Celtic Tiger peak.
In Dublin, a double room without an en-suite averaged €876 in a house and €1,005 in an apartment.
You can play Dublin Rent Roulette here.
Journal Media Ltd has shareholders in common with Daft.ie publisher Distilled Media Group.