FOURTEEN HOUSEHOLDS HAVE been hit with eviction notices from the investment fund that owns their homes in Killarney, Co Kerry.

All homes that Cypus-based Xerico owns in the Loretto Convents estate have been served with a legal Notice of Termination.

In total 15 children and 25 adults are affected.

They live in an area of the town that was converted from a convent into four apartments, with a further ten houses making up the properties owned in the estate by Xerico.

The company is a subsidiary of the London-based real estate company LRC Group, which owns hundreds of rentals in Ireland.

In the case of Killarney, the homes are managed by a company located in Dublin called Home Club.

The landlord’s notice to quit gives families until next July to move out.

Families facing eviction from Loretto Convents estate in Killarney

Those affected have reacted with dismay to the news that they will all be forced to find somewhere else to live.

“There’s no housing options in Killarney,” Ana Navarro told The Journal.

The University College Cork researcher and her fiancé Rich Gordon are paying €1,400 monthly after moving into the estate two years ago after finding it difficult to get somewhere closer to her workplace.

“We moved from Cork because we couldn’t find anything there, so it’s a grim scenario, because moving into as smaller town we were thinking that we couldn’t encounter this kind of problem,” she said.

Their 17-month-old goes to crèche in the town, and the “thought of having to re-enter a waiting list for childcare, if we had to move outside of Killarney, is extremely frustrating”, Navarro said.

Other families were intending to apply to schools this month for next year but have been hampered in that as they don’t know where they will be living next year.

The homes were bought in 2019 for a sum of €1.4 million according to the Property Price Register.

Some of the families believe that their contract is being ended because they have a reached the sixth year of their tenancy and faced becoming tenancy of unlimited duration, making it harder to end their contract.

Under what are known as Part 4 tenancies, renters automatically get security of tenure and can stay in the property for six years, if the tenancy was created before 11 June 2022. However, following changes introduced after that date, a tenancy automatically becomes one of unlimited duration if the landlord does not terminate it under the old rules.

The families have appealed for Kerry County Council to step in and try to acquire the homes under a scheme that lets a landlord sell to local authorities if they’re looking to sell.

The council has acquired 23 properties under the programme in the past two years.

“We hope that that is a viable option,” Navarro said, “We really need help here to try because it’s going to be very stressful to find somewhere else to live.”

Xerico and its Irish office, managed by Home Club, were contacted and did not respond. Kerry County Council said it was still examining the situation.