Residential Tenancies Board · adjudication and tribunal

The adjudicator works from what you filed.

Most Irish tenancy disputes are decided by the Residential Tenancies Board rather than by a court. Both sides submit evidence in advance, the adjudicator reviews it and issues a legally binding determination order, and hearings are usually held remotely by video. Evidence has to reach the RTB at least five working days before the hearing, and if you disagree with the outcome you have ten working days to appeal to the Tenancy Tribunal, which rehears the case in full.

Capture the listing or thread How it works

Works on Chrome and Edge. From $4.99 (approx. €4.30) as a one-off, or a 7-day trial that requires a credit card.

Illustrative example. Both files can be submitted. Only one of them can be checked.

The Residential Tenancies Board decides the disputes that would otherwise clog the courts, and it decides them on evidence filed in advance. The most common applications concern the validity of a notice of termination, unlawful termination, rent arrears, deposit retention, and overholding. Each party submits its evidence before the hearing, the adjudicator reviews it and issues a determination order that is legally binding, and hearings are usually held remotely by video call. The RTB asks for evidence at least five working days before the hearing, and everything you upload in an adjudication or a tribunal is shared with the other party. A party who disagrees has ten working days from receiving the adjudication report to appeal to the Tenancy Tribunal, which rehears the matter in full, and either side may put in extra evidence before that hearing. Because the file is built before anyone speaks, the quality of what you preserved decides most of it. ProofSnap captures the original listing, the inventory, the rent record, the notice and the message thread as a package containing the full page, the saved source, the URL, the UTC capture time, a SHA-256 hash of every file, an RSA-4096 signature and an eIDAS qualified timestamp, which in Ireland carries the Article 41 presumption directly. From $4.99 (approx. €4.30) as a one-off.

By Radim Motycka, Founder and Lead Engineer, ProofSnap · · Independently verifiable via Trust Verifier

How these disputes actually run

The listing changes, and then the hearing arrives

Applications are heard weeks or months after the thing that caused them. By then the advertisement has been pulled and the thread has been tidied.

The listing no longer says what it said

Rental advertisements are edited constantly: heating, parking, furnishings, what is included in the rent. When the listing that made you sign is gone, you are describing it from memory while the other side describes it differently.

The repair thread gets tidied up

Agents change and portals archive. The repair you chased four times becomes a repair nobody remembers being asked about, and an undocumented request is indistinguishable from one that never happened.

A termination notice lives or dies on its detail

The validity of a notice of termination is the single most common dispute. Dates, grounds, service and the wording all matter, and the notice and the covering message are exactly the documents people fail to preserve.

How the process is structured

Adjudication first, tribunal on appeal, and a determination order that binds. The timelines are short at the points that matter.

Evidence filed in advance

Each party submits its evidence before the hearing and the adjudicator reviews it. A hearing is usually held remotely by video, so unlike a purely paper process you can speak, but you will be speaking to a file that was already built.

A binding determination order

The adjudicator issues a determination order that is legally binding on the parties. Enforcement, if it comes to that, is a separate step through the courts.

Ten working days to appeal

A party who disagrees has ten working days from receiving the adjudication report to appeal to the Tenancy Tribunal, which rehears the case in full rather than reviewing the first decision. If nobody appeals, the determination order usually becomes legally binding about two weeks after the appeal period ends. That is a short window and it starts running immediately.

Five working days to file your evidence

The RTB asks for evidence at least five working days before the hearing, by email or by post, and it is added to a case file shared with the adjudicator and the other party. Anything you have not captured by then is unlikely to be in front of the adjudicator at all.

A note for landlords and letting agents

This cuts both ways. A landlord claiming against a deposit has to evidence the condition at the start and at the end, and a termination notice has to be right on its face. Capture the listing as published on the day it goes live, keep the inventory and the photographs, and keep the thread showing what was reported and when. The same package that protects a tenant against an unfair deduction protects a landlord against a claim that the property was never as advertised.

How do I capture the listing before an RTB hearing?

No forensic training required. The proof is in the package, not in your testimony about how careful you were.

1

Capture while it is live

Open the listing, the portal message, the notice or the thread and capture it. The full page is saved, including the parts below the fold that a phone screenshot would cut off.

2

Everything is hashed and timestamped

SHA-256 for every file, an RSA-4096 signature over the manifest, an eIDAS qualified timestamp and a Bitcoin blockchain anchor, so the date cannot be moved afterwards.

3

File it with your application

Attach the PDF evidence report to your submission. The adjudicator gets a document that reads cleanly and that the other side can verify independently.

What is in an RTB evidence package?

Between 11 and 15 files depending on your plan, delivered as one ZIP that anyone can check without installing anything.

Full-page screenshot

The whole page, not just the visible window, stitched and hashed.

Saved page source

The document as rendered at capture time, including the head, meta tags and structured data.

Extracted page text

Searchable plain text, so a quote can be found and cited without retyping.

Technical metadata

URL, page title, HTTP response headers, browser, operating system and the capture time in UTC.

Signed manifest

SHA-256 for every file, signed with an RSA-4096 key whose public key ships in the package.

Blockchain timestamp

The manifest hash anchored to Bitcoin via OpenTimestamps, so the capture time cannot be backdated.

Chain of custody and forensic log

A record of what happened during the capture, in the order it happened.

Evidence report as PDF

A readable summary you can attach to an application, a notice or a report.

Verification instructions

Written steps plus scripts, so the other side can re-check the hashes offline.

Where all of that comes from

Every file above is produced by one press in the side panel, while the listing, the messages or the inventory are still on screen. Nothing has to be assembled after the tenancy ends, which is usually when the useful pages start disappearing.

Capture as many pages as the dispute needs. Each one becomes its own sealed package, so an adjudicator can take them one at a time instead of weighing a folder against an explanation.

Want to see what comes out before you install anything? Download a sample evidence package and open it yourself.

The ProofSnap side panel open beside a page in Chrome, with the capture button, the qualified timestamp option and the Trust Verifier link

Anyone can verify it, including the other side. Drop the ZIP onto the public Trust Verifier and the hashes, the signature and the timestamp are checked in the browser. Nothing is uploaded and nothing depends on ProofSnap still existing.

Three ways to get the evidence

Prices are charged in USD. Approximate euro figures are shown for orientation only, and your card issuer sets the actual rate.

One dispute

$4.99 once

approx. €4.30

A SnapPack is a single up-front purchase for a set number of captures. No subscription, no auto-renewal, no trial. Best when you have one problem and you want it documented today.

Get a SnapPack

Ongoing matters

$8.99/month

approx. €7.80

For anyone who captures regularly: practitioners, property managers, HR, investigators. The 7-day free trial requires a credit card. Cancel any time during the trial and you are not charged.

Start the 7-day trial

We do it for you

$44.99 per URL

approx. €39

Send us the link and our team captures the package for you, with nothing to install. Useful when the capture should not come from a party to the dispute.

See the capture service

ProofSnap is not a law firm and does not give legal advice. Qualified timestamps are issued by Disig a.s., a Qualified Trust Service Provider on the EU Trusted List. Ireland applies eIDAS directly as an EU member state, so that timestamp carries the Article 41 presumption here without any retained-law argument.

Official sources

Every figure and deadline on this page comes from the following primary sources. Check them yourself rather than taking our word for it.

If the dispute has spilled into online reviews or posts about you, the defamation guide covers the separate one-year clock that attaches to those. Label every document and put the check-in and the check-out material side by side. An adjudicator reading a tidy, dated file decides on the merits. An adjudicator reading a pile of undated screenshots decides on whatever else is in front of them.

Questions people actually ask

Capture it now, file it properly

The listing you are looking at today is the evidence you will need in four months. It will not be there then.

Capture the listing or thread ProofSnap in Ireland
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