The decline in house sales has stymied a short-term boom in rental values.

After months of growing demand for a limited amount of rented accommodation - as the availability of mortgages fell due to the credit crunch - rental prices in Belfast have now dropped by almost three per cent over the last three months.

Experts said this is a knock-on effect of falling house prices along with low interest rates and has now left a glut of properties to let, according to new research.

Researchers said there was a discernible upsurge in what they call 'unplanned landlords' who are forced into offering for rent houses which they cannot sell - or at least cannot sell for the price they are asking.

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It revealed that rents in the city are now starting to follow house prices - which have fallen 40% from their summer 2007 peak.

The figures were contained in research commissioned by Gumtree, a website which carries free adverts for property and other goods.

Gumtree said that its research indicated many of the unplanned landlords had turned to renting out their property as an interim solution in the hope that the property market will rise again.

However, the overwhelming majority of economists have predicted that, in line with previous property crashes, when prices do stop falling there is unlikely to be any big increase in asking prices for several years.

The 2.9% fall in Belfast rents is slightly above the average decline of 2.2% across the UK

It has also emerged that properties are increasingly managed by individuals "worryingly unaware of the processes involved in being a landlord".

More than half of the landlords surveyed had failed to draw up a legal contract for their tenants and only 38% in Northern Ireland had taken out home insurance.

(BMcC/JM)