Dr. Colin Hunt:

If you go back to when the start of Covid-19, when the pandemic arrived here, you would not have predicted what happened to the economy. You would not have predicted the pace of the recovery or what happened in relation to house prices. The biggest challenge we face as a society is the gap between housing demand and housing supply. It is not so much the demand; it is the housing supply catching up but not yet bridging that gap. That is going to remain an important feature in terms of the stability and strength of the housing market. That said, affordability will be impacted by a number of factors. If you think about it, there are a number of variables working here. Wages, taxation, energy costs and interest rates all will play a role in predicting what will happen to affordability. It is something we are monitoring very closely. However it would be foolhardy for us to predict what will happen to house prices.