Conall MacCoille

But if you look at the mortgage market, people are not taking out the kind of multiples of their income that we saw in 2007, 2008.

This is really just because the housing market is illiquid.

There's lack of properties.

If you look at, say, rented yields of, say, 5%, roughly on average across the country, there's still well in excess of interest rates of 3% to 4% on mortgages.

So it still makes more sense to buy than to rent.

So look, it's a difficult market, but at least the kind of pace of price increases is slowing.

Well, in that particular instance, yes.

And I think it does reflect home buyers competing against each other, bidding up the price.

But I think we do have an issue in the Irish housing market, which is that asking prices have not been set at a realistic level.

If you look at the UK, typically the asking price is set and you see a small discount in good times and bad when the housing market in the UK is hot or cold.

And the UK housing market has got substantially more transactions amongst existing homeowners.

Chains are a feature of the UK housing market.

It clearly seems to be a less fraught, traumatic process for people in the UK to move home.

What we really see in the Irish market is that first time buyers are very buoyant.

Clearly they're very keen to get on the ladder.

But people who have homes are very, very reluctant to move.

That's interesting.

Why is that?

Well, I think if you look at the housing market, it's clearly not acting as well as it might do.

Part of that is maybe the conveyancing process.