Ms Lisa Kearney:

I am the current president of IPAV and I want to revisit the comment that front-loading all the documents will delay property going on the market. It certainly is not going to delay a property going on the market; in fact, it will help that property. We, as agents, meet vendors on a daily basis. We say to them the list of documents that they need to put their properties on the market. Approximately 70% of my vendors come back to me and say that they have gone to their solicitors to request these documents and to get things in line with the property going on the market. Seventy per cent of them have come back to say their solicitors have advised them that the documents will not be ready until the property goes sale agreed. That is 70% of people now who are putting properties on the market and none of the documents are ready. We go through the process of putting a house on the market, we go through the viewings, we show the property and we move to sale agreed, which all takes six to eight weeks. After a property has been made sale agreed, the solicitor produces the contract and it is then that issues come to light so the purchasers then have to go through all of that. By the time the contract is completed, the period will have reached ten to 13 weeks but a lot of those buyers will have given notice to their landlords, engaged engineers and paid for that, paid their bank valuer to conduct their mortgage bank valuation or have architects and engineers in, which all costs. Those buyers will have spent the bones of €2,000 or €3,000 on a property but issues come to light and, therefore, they cannot buy the property. They are then back on the property market hunting but they have already lost €2,000 or €3,000. By front-loading and getting all of these documents, we are saying to them that this is the property they are looking at, this is the property that is on the market, this is the property with all the documents, it is in good hands, it is a property that can be sold and bought and, therefore, come and view the property and bid. It is not the reverse of that. I have had very many purchasers come back to me, and they are extremely frustrated and upset about it. They are out of accommodation which leads to another problem, and that is the rental market, as we all know but they are already at a loss because they cannot buy this property. The time delay the solicitors are outlining is incorrect. If the property comes to the market, at least we know we have a saleable product, like a car as Mr. Davitt said, or like anything else that comes to the market.

We need to be able to assure our buyers and vendors that their product is a saleable product. At the moment, many of them, 32%, are not.