Having returned from a 3 week holiday in Ireland, I am sorry that the housing market there is in such a difficult place. There are currently 300,000 brand-new homes unoccupied and it is expected that, even in the long-term, many of them never will be. Looking at the market back here at home it occurs to me that we are in a very different position: there is no overall over-supply of housing. There may be particular issues in City Centres with flats, but we don’t have too many housing units: far from it. There is a degree of pent-up demand and once we get lending back to a decent level, I can see the market taking off again. By that I don’t mean that prices will start to increase, but rather that people will get back to what were pre-boom “normal” levels of activity: people moving up and down the property ladder to meet their housing needs and not in some mad money making scramble. I think we are all wiser to the fact that there are snakes to slide down out there as well as ladders to climb!

- Andrew