Conall MacCoille

Part of that is the lack of chains.

And also part of it is that we see these asking prices which aren't representative of the final price.

You know, I think when a fifth of transactions are going 20% above the original asking price, you know, I think people can do better.

And, you know, that suggests that asking prices aren't in many cases representative of the true market price.

That's clearly not desirable.

I think it's something we need to think about.

I'd have to go and do my sums on that.

I'm not positioned to say if that's true or not.

I mean, the VAT rate being cut will certainly help with the fringes.

But if you look at apartment building, I mean, these apartment blocks have been sold to approved housing bodies, county councils.

Before that, you know, pension funds and international institutional investors.

And what's very clear is that there has been a market for ordinary homebuyers.

Ordinary homebuyers are not willing to buy apartments at the cost to build of maybe even over €500,000.

So they prefer to live in...

you know, suburbia, further out from town in a traditional house.

So there's a kind of real viability issue around apartment building.

The pickup in interest rates that we saw, if we look at, say, a German 10-year bundle today, it's still around 2.7%, rather than being close to zero four or five years ago.

So that, you know, there still is a very big issue around viability and, you know, buyers of these apartments

Apart from blocks outside of approved housing bodies and county councils.

So, look, it will help on the fringes.