Ms Marie Hunt:

I have a couple of things to point out. The first lesson is that having a property market that is wholly dependent on domestic investors and developers and primarily debt-funded by a small cohort of domestic banks is not sustainable and I hope we have moved away from those days. In terms of Government intervention, there should be consultation with the industry before implementing policies to tease out the unintended consequences. We have mentioned data on numerous occasions. We need comprehensive data from an independent source and interaction with firms such as ours, which are tracking useful information because if we have that we might be able to spot trends and possible threats at an earlier juncture.

I have been watching closely work done by the Investment Property Forum in the United Kingdom, UK. It is a cohort of people involved in the property industry and they are doing a piece of research examining the next commercial real estate crash in the UK and how that might affect financial viability. It has come up with some very interesting suggestions which we could possibly adopt here, one of which is giving consideration to setting up a central lending register whereby if borrower A goes to bank A the bank knows that borrower is also exposed to other banks-----