What would you change if you were Minister for Housing that you would see as improving the lot, both in terms of supply of housing and also in terms of benefiting both tenants and would-be homebuyers?

I think the really obvious one is the vacant home stuff.

And I know people are going on about this for years, but there's still like well over 160,000 homes that are habitable.

So let's not include the derelict ones that are habitable, that are vacant all around the country.

And it just, to me, that just makes the most sense to tackle that first because it's the low hanging fruit.

It's a lot easier.

But the way housing policy has gone is it's very much about pump money into demand side schemes so you're helped to buy your first home scheme all this stuff where it's not improving supply it's just giving people more demand more fuel let's say to spend and it's not working so like prices are at an all-time high I know there's a couple of reports recently saying prices aren't going up as fast as they were but they're still going up and Like if you look at the overall graph, we're still going up and up.

We're not there.

Does that tell us that buyers are still just stretched?

Yeah, it's, it's a huge amount of money.

And if you're talking nationwide, and then in Dublin it's, it's even worse.

I think it's, it's well over five hundred thousand euro, the median sale price.

So it, if you look at the kinda, the graph or the chart, and if you, y- you look at it over the last kinda ten, fifteen years, we're st- we're still climbing.

It's still going up.

And I think these reports, we probably need, you know, a bit more data, kinda maybe four or five reports in a row to start showing the same thing in order to see is this an actual trend or is it a one-off.

Um, uh, Ciaran, it's, uh, kind of despairing listening to, to the pair of you, um, for anybody out there who's stuck in very high rent and, uh, not seeing much, uh, not seeing a huge glimmer of hope on the horizon.

What's the first thing you tell people they need to consider if you were starting it all over again?

The first thing I always tell people is it's a free service.

You go to the centralcreditregister.ie, it's a government thing, and you basically just put in your details and they'll send you out what's called your credit report, which is vital.

So that will basically tell you if you've any kind of skeletons that you forgot about from a credit card in college or whatever.

And it just gives you any kind of loans or existing things.

It gives you a real summary of where you are in terms of loans or anything like that, that may cause an issue with a lender.

So that's the first thing to do.

Well, I was reading that the housing minister has directed officials to examine, to look at the online bidding portals that have been used by some auctioneers, you know, over concerns, Ciarán, that they're nearly mimicking gambling products and actually driving up the house prices.

just read this yeah so

it's just something it's also everything in one place because instagram is a bit of a pain and then people aren't reading as much or or whatever so it's just like a digital searchable version of that of the book where you can type in let's say i want to buy a two-bed apartment what do i need to know okay and it it will tell you everything you need to know give you all the steps and there's checklists and it's a whole guide there but it might say you know you just need to be careful on the deposit you might need more of a deposit whatever so it's just everything in one place and then there's a few other A few other bells and whistles to it as well.

Like there's a report tool function where you can put in, say, a house that you're interested in or a home that you're interested in buying.

You put in the details and it gives you like a 25 page report on kind of what, you know, where the evidence points to in terms of what it might actually be worth.

A kind of bidding strategy, what's around at schools, transport, the usual kind of stuff.

Yeah.

Even more importantly, kind of how much it will cost to maybe renovate it up to a certain standard and you can put in what standard you want it to get to and just pulls all the data and all the stats from everywhere and kind of just puts it into a PDF down for you.

Okay, so...

What are your tips? Can you share them with us, Ciarán? I've

loads of tips, yes.

I'm not just going to complain.

I could do an hour of quick-fire tips.

And another thing! Yeah, but I guess the first thing to do, so people are kind of embarking on the mortgage thing.

Something I didn't do, which I've learned the hard way, is get a credit report.

So there's a thing called the Central Credit Register.

We hate that one.

And like they're themselves asking the question, is there anything wrong with it? Like, is it actually misleading? What's the difference between that and using Photoshop previously?

Well, that's where it all started, didn't it? It started with the wide angle lenses, the blue skies photoshopped into the background and then maybe a little bit of touching up.

And it's just gotten, you know, where is it going to stop now? It's evolving into adding on extensions, putting in gardens that don't exist, this kind of thing.

Like I saw one where they had furniture in there that just physically would not fit in the room.

And I guess the the justification is, you know, they're shown, some people maybe are not able to visualise that themselves, I feel that's a very belittling of people, like people are stupid, you know, they know what can be done with a house, but it's, look, it's not the biggest problem, and as I said, it's down to a lack of supply, and I think when estate agents there's a lot of estate agents in the country and most of them do a great job and there's so few homes for them to sell so when one estate agent starts doing something well then they all feel like they have to start doing because they're all battling it out for a very few number of properties that are for sale and the less properties are for sale the less money they make and they you know they've built their families to feed as well so i can understand this i can understand why it's getting more popular it's It's easily done now as well with AI.

It's much easier to use.

It must be

There's a texter here, Ciarán Mulqueen, who says, I just think it's wasting people's time if the photographs aren't actually a real photograph of the property at that moment in time.