Mr. Keith Anderson:

I am 40 years in the business and every day of the week we deal with people buying houses. We do our best. I concur with what my colleague has said. First, I give people a list of things to be sorted out. The price of the property is put on the market. Our biggest enjoyment is to get first-time buyers a house and out of the rental sector. The biggest difficulty is when the sales go on and on and the next thing the mortgage is out of date. If a buyer is self-employed, it is very difficult to get that mortgage again. If they give the notice on 30 March, they have to buy the rented house and it still goes on for extra two or three months. We get the calls all the time because we are dealing with people. We know exactly what can happen.

What I said earlier is that if it is front-loaded and there is a cost where the vendor is paying €300 or €400 for a BER certificate beforehand, they will pay an extra €500 or €600 as part-payment and then pay the total when the sale has gone through. We did surveys throughout Europe which found that 28 days was the average sale time. In Ireland, we hear the average is four and a half months but I believe it is closer to six months at the moment. We deal with it every day of the week. It takes six months, there will be more arguments and difficulties.

There is one other issue. Gazumping is mentioned in the newspapers. We do not gazump, but if an offer comes in for a property after it has gone sale agreed, we are obliged by law to let the vendor know. The vendor can say they are not happy with how long the process has gone on, things have changed and they want more money. That looks bad for us at the end of the day. All we want to do is get an exclusion for this, front-load it and get the ammunition ready. A lot of that can be done fairly quickly. Do not tell me it is a cost thing because we do not get costs upfront either. The whole thing is to get the process flowing. It flows throughout Europe. We can blame digital, banks and everything else but the day-to-day issue is to get people out of the rental sector and into a property.