Ryanair Looks to Buy Property to Shelter Staff Amid Ireland Housing Crunch

Ryanair is considering buying apartments in Dublin to help staff struggling to find accommodation due to a severe shortage of housing, the Irish airline’s chief financial officer said on Monday.

Ireland is struggling to fix a years-long supply and demand mismatch in housing that the government has said is stopping some large companies from expanding and could curtail a post-pandemic economic boom.

The most recent data from Daft.ie, Ireland’s main property listings site, showed there were just 959 homes available to rent across the whole of Ireland for a population of 5.1 million people.

Like other firms that have had to block book hotel rooms for new starters, Ryanair recently rented student accommodation at nearby Dublin City University for some staff that transferred to Dublin airport, finance chief Neil Sorohan told Reuters.

“It is something that we’re very cognizant of, something that we’re looking at. We’re looking at apartments and other bits and pieces over the next number of months, we may actually buy some,” Sorohan said in a telephone interview.

“Moving into actually buying property is something new. I think it’s possibly the right thing to do, it’s a good long term investment.”

Ryanair, Europe’s largest airline by passengers numbers, employs 3,128 people in Dublin, including engineers, pilots, cabin crew, ground staff and workers at its headquarters near the airport.

Sorohan added that tighter labor markets across Europe had not made it much more difficult to hire staff and that job cuts by tech multinationals with Irish operations had made it easier to add workers in its Ryanair Labs digital hub in Dublin.

(Reporting by Padraic Halpin; Editing by Mark Potter)

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